Fepruary 8, 1917]. 
NATURE 
451. 
storage yard connected with the main railway by 
a switch line. 
natural and artificial seasoning of timber, a saw- 
mill, a carpenter’s shop, and eight laboratories, 
‘devised for technical research in timber-testing, 
the physical properties of wood, pathology, wood- 
preservation, . wood-distillation, paper and pulp 
manufacture, and engineering and chemistry 
problems connected with timber. The research 
work undertaken is all carefully planned with the 
express object of obtaining results which will 
directly benefit the timber merchant and consumer. 
The field covered in the general scheme laid down 
for research accordingly includes every important 
industry which derives its raw material from the 
forest. 
The Forest Products Branch in the United 
States furnishes a model which might readily be 
adapted to our needs. The interests, however, 
of the timber trade, of the home consumer, and of 
British owners of woodlands must all be carefully 
considered, if a satisfactory general scheme is to 
be evolved. The Bureau of Information and 
Statistics would necessarily be in London. The 
laboratories and workshops could perhaps be 
established in connection with the university 
which took the greatest interest in the project. 
NOTES. 
Lorp Devonport, the Food Controller, has issued 
a statement pointing out the urgent need for economy 
in food, and the necessity for some curtailment of the 
Mation’s food consumption. The three most im- 
portant staples. of daily consumption are bread, meat, 
and sugar, and forethought for the sustenance 
of the population requires a decision as to whether 
compulsion is necessary to ensure an equitable distribu- 
tion and conservation of available supplies. Compul- 
sory rationing to a fixed quantity per head involves a 
very elaborate machinery, which in itself absorbs 
labour, and for that reason alone ought to be avoided 
unless absolutely necessary. Therefore, having care- 
fully weighed the advantages and disadvantages, 
ithe Food Controller has come to the conclusion 
that a voluntary system is preferable until further 
experience is gained, and meanwhile to trust to 
the nation’s instinct of self-discipline. The fol- 
lowing allowance is based on the average weekly 
consumption of each of the commodities named 
which should be permitted to each person. 
After consideration of available stocks and probable 
means of future supplies, the situation requires that 
heads of families should endeavour to limit themselves 
to the weekly purchase for each person comprising the 
household of the following quantities per head per 
week :—Bread, 4 lb. (or its equivalent in flour, 3 Ib. 
for bread-making) ; meat, 24 Ib.; sugar, $]b. Although 
‘these quantities will form the basis of the dietary scale, 
they will naturally be supplemented by other food 
products. The nation is placed upon its honour to 
observe these conditions. The effect upon consump- 
tion will reveal itself through the statistical returns 
available to the Food Controller. Meanwhile, to meet 
the contingency that rationing may become necessary, 
the machinery to bring such a system into operatioe 
is being organised, so that if and when required it 
maybe ready. It is hoped that a patriotic en- 
deavour will be made by everyone to limit consumption 
wherever possible to below the standard indicated, and 
‘by so doing render rationing unnecessary. 
No. 2467, VOL. 98] 
There are sheds and buildings for. 
THE report of a committee of the Royal Society, 
made at the request of the President of the Board 
of Trade, on the food supply of the United Kingdom 
has just been issued. It is divided into three parts, the 
first dealing with food supply in the period 1909-13, 
the second with food supply in 1916, and the third 
with possible methods of economising the available 
food supply. The recommendations respecting econ- 
omies are as follow :—(1) The possibility of a better 
recovery of flour in milling; (2) the possibility of more 
economical meat production; (3) the possible increase 
in the national food supply which might result from a 
eneral practice of making cheese in place of butter; 
4) a consideration of the economy of food which might 
be effected by the prohibition of brewing. 
Tue formation of the new Air Board is authorised by 
an Order in Council published in the London Gazette 
of Tuesday last. The composition. of the board is as 
follows :—President, Viscount Cowdray ; Parliamentary 
Secretary, Major J. L. Baird; Fifth Sea Lord of the 
Admiralty, Commodore G. Paine; Director-General of 
Military Aeronautics, Lieut.-General Sir David Hen- 
derson; Controller of Aeronautical Supplies, William 
Weir; Controller of Petrol Engines, Percy Martin; 
secretary, Sir Paul Harvey; assistant secretary, 
H. W. W. McAnally; private secretary to the Parlia- 
mentary Secretary, C. G. Evans. 
At the scientific meeting of the Royal Dublin Society 
on January 23, Lord Rathdonnell, president, in the 
chair, the Boyle medal of the society was presented 
to Prof. H. H. Dixon in recognition of his distin- 
guished work for botanical science, and particularly 
his investigations on transpiration and the ascent of 
sap in plants. 
Pror. R. Saunppy has been appointed to deliver 
the Harveian Oration to the Royal _College of 
Physicians of London for the present year. Dr. 
E. S. Reynolds is to be the Bradshaw Lecturer. Dr. 
T. M. Legge will be the Milroy Lecturer in 1918. 
WE regret to notice the death, on Sunday last, 
February 4, at the age of seventy-three years, of 
Mr. C. Owen Waterhouse, formerly assistant keeper 
of the British Museum (Natural History). 
By the death of Mr. John Tebbutt, of Windsor, 
N.S.W., briefly announced in our issue of last week, 
disappears, at the ripe age of eighty-four, one of the few 
remaining links that connect the astronomy of to-day 
with the older form that Airy and his school recognised 
and practised. The late Mr. Tebbutt, as a loyal mem- 
ber of that school, worked hard to record positions, to 
deduce orbits, and to study planetary markings. In- 
adequate instruments did not rob him of the delight of 
industrious occupation in his selected science, but he 
did a far greater work than discover comets and pain- 
fully determine their position by imperfect means. In 
a nascent colony in which the conditions of life were 
adverse to scientific study, and where the stimulus of 
sympathetic companionship was utterly wanting, he 
worthily upheld the claims of intellectual study, and 
struggled manfully in the pursuit of research. He 
was of the highest type of amateur, one who followed 
his own inclinations with ardour and enjoyment, never 
tiring and never changing; he had his reward in well- 
doing. He observed Donati’s comet, nearly fifty years 
ago, and among his latest observations those of comets 
still found a place. He was the discoverer of the great 
comet of 1861, following it with a sextant, and though 
such an instrument was utterly inadequate for the 
purpose, as the writer of this note can unfortunately 
testify, for it fell to him to reduce the observations, 
yet the Observatory at Melbourne was little better off, 
