12 NATURE 
[May 1, 1902 
advanced a step further on the road to incorporation than 
University College. The Royal College of Science, with 
its intimate connection with the Board of Education and 
its exceptional facilities for training teachers of science, 
would worthily fill an important part in the work of the 
University. The Central Technical College of the City 
Guilds, subsidised by the wealthy City companies, pro- 
vides higher education, and could immediately take its 
place in the University to teach advanced technology. 
Bedford College, too, which has specialised in the 
direction of the higher education of women, must be 
included. 
Finally, there are the polytechnics. On more than one 
occasion it has been pointed out in NATURE that the 
amount of research work accomplished in the poly- 
technics of greater London rivals successfully that done 
in many university colleges. It must, it is true, be 
admitted that to be worthy of the great University 
which it is hoped the current decade will see thoroughly 
established, the polytechnics will have to curtail their 
work. At present they attempt the education of all 
comers from twelve years of age and upwards. But just 
as it has been made a condition of the incorporation of 
University College that the school in connection with it 
shall be moved elsewhere, so in the case of the poly- 
technics, the existing day schools for boys and girls, 
where an education on the lines of the ‘School of 
Science ” curriculum of the Board of Education is given, 
will have to be transplanted, in order that the buildings 
and the equipment of the polytechnics may be entirely 
at the disposal of the senate of the University. Similarly, 
the recreative side of the general training offered by 
many of the polytechnics will have to be provided else- 
where, for it will scarcely be compatible with the dignity 
of a great university to perpetuate the present arrange- 
ments for providing students with social enjoyments. 
With these modifications, and perhaps some others, the 
polytechnics, situated as they are in all parts of the 
metropolitan area, as will be seen from the accompany- 
ing outline map (Fig. 1), based upon the Report of the 
London Technical Education Board for 1900-1901, are 
peculiarly well adapted to become constituent colleges. 
There are immediate advantages accruing from an 
arrangement such as that outlined of a comprehensive 
university, consisting of the three university colleges, the 
Royal College of Science, the City Guilds Institute, the 
thirteen or so polytechnics, and perhaps a few other more 
specialised institutions, all bound together as necessary 
parts of one university, possessing the same aspirations, 
and all engaged in the same work of higher education. 
Such an organised whole will effect far more for London 
than the present individual and sporadic efforts of 
separate uncoordinated institutions competing the one 
against the other. And such an university could still 
preserve its former character as an imperial examining 
board for granting degrees. 
A development of this kind and on this scale will 
doubtless necessitate the expenditure of many times the 
million pounds asked for by University College. But 
when the inhabitants of the wealthiest city in the world 
are educated to understand that no spending is so profit- 
able as that on higher education and on the endowment 
of research, there will be little difficulty in obtaining the 
necessary funds. The immediate necessity is the pro- 
vision of the amount required to ensure the incorporation 
of University College in the University of London ; but 
this must be followed by a strenuous endeavour on the 
part of all men of science and influential men in every 
other department of mental activity to instruct Londoners 
in their duty towards their city and country of providing 
a permanently endowed University of London, consisting 
of constituent colleges situated in every part of the 
enormous area for the higher education of which the 
University is responsible. 
NO. 1696. VOL. 66] 
PROF. ALFRED CORNU. 
(CoG was born in 1841 at Chateauneuf, and en- 
tered the great military school of Paris, the Ecole 
Polytechnique, at the age of nineteen. After four years 
of study there he entered the Ecole des Mines, which he 
quitted in 1866, thus completing a brilliant career as a 
student. One year later, at the age of twenty-six, he 
was chosen as professor of physics at the Ecole Poly- 
technique, a post which he filled to the end of his life 
and adorned with the many results of his scientific 
researches. 
It would be impossible in a brief review of Cornu’s 
life to give more than the barest outline of his 
contributions to original knowledge. His position as 
a teacher gave him, amidst the material surroundings of 
his laboratory, the leisure to work. The beauty, the 
dignified ease and perfection of his investigations, the 
keen perspicacity of his observations, the masterly re- 
straint, so to speak, of the scientific memoirs which from 
time to time he contributed to the scientific world, all 
bespeak a man of no ordinary capabilities, a master 
of his profession. Clear in his exposition of scientific 
matters, exquisitely clear alike in his experimental 
demonstrations and in the language in which he ex- 
pounded their theory, he was as great in teaching as in 
research. Optics was his first love, and though he 
laboured successfully in other branches of experimental 
physics, it was to optics that he returned, and in the field 
of optics were achieved his greatest successes in physical 
investigation. The pages of the Comptes rendus and of 
the Journal de Physique bear eloquent testimony to the 
activity and penetration of his mind. Already, from 
1863 to 1865, he had begun to cor tribute to the Académie 
des Sciences notes, the earliest of which relate to the 
refraction and reflection of light and to the problems of 
crystalline reflection. Following on the work of Jamin, 
he later pursued the subjects of vitreous and metallic re- 
flection, and studied the connection between them. He 
showed that they were but parts of one and the same 
phenomenon, though affecting different regions of the 
spectrum, there being, as he showed, a true continuity 
between them. 
Soon after entering upon the duties of his chair 
Cornu began with laborious and patient preparation 
those experiments upon the velocity of propagation of 
light which have become classical. Fizeau on the one 
hand, Foucault on the other, had already made deter- 
minations, each on his own lines. Foucault’s value, 
then supposed to be the best, was 2°98 x 1o! in C.G,S. 
units. Cornu’s results, of which an account will be 
found in some detail in NATURE of February 4, ale 
raised this figure to 3004 x 10!®, in vacuo, or 3°0033, in 
air. His method, which was fundamentally the same as 
that of Fizeau, was applied to the transit of light over a 
distance of 46 kilometres (or between two stations 23 
kilometres apart, the one at the Observatoire, the other at 
Monthéry) ; and the instrumental perfection of his rotatory 
apparatus enabled him to observe up to the twenty-first 
extinction of the beam, thus securing a precision far in 
advance of that attained by Fizeau. For his determina- 
tion of the velocity of light he was awarded the frzx 
Lacaze in 1878, the same year in which his merits were 
recognised by his admission to the Académie des Sciences. 
In 1872 he wrote papers on the theory of electrostatics, 
in which he expounded the potential theories of Gauss © 
and Green, then little known in France. They are to be 
found in vol. i. of the Journal de Physique, then recently 
founded by his friend d’Alméida. 
For several subsequent years Cornu was occupied 
with researches on the spectrum. He measured the 
wave-lengths of the hydrogen rays with a_ pre- 
cision previously unknown, enabling a comparison 
to be made between the values so obtained by ex- 
periment and the theoretical formule which had been 
POD PO el ~ 
