én” 
a 
JUNE 30, 192 
NATURE 
871 

of making a large discount from the claims made in 
commission reports generally. 
Since the new departure in the early eighties the 
Science Collections, alike in pure and in applied science, 
have had many acquisitions of great and abiding 
interest, and the methods of displaying these have 
developed steadily. The aim of the Museum has been 
~ to do all that considered preparation of objects and 
appropriate methods of exhibition can do to enable 
scientific instruments, machinery, models, etc., to 
speak for themselves. By exhibited objects, it affords 
telling illustration and exposition pertaining to the 
various branches of science within its field and of their 
applications in the arts and industries. It also pre- 
serves appliances which hold honoured places in the 
_ progress of science or in the history of invention, and 
with such exhibits it associates the names of the great 
men to whom the world owes these successive advances. 
This human element in the interests which the Science 
Collections present accounts for no small part of the 
_erowds who visit the galleries at times when any large 
section of the public is free from work. The exhibited 
machines, or other inventions which have created or 
revolutionised industries and have altered conditions 
of life, arouse in even the most casual of visitors some- 
thing more than admiration for the genius and skill 
of the inventor. Such objects as those illustrating 
early steam-engines, telegraphs and telephones, or the 
successive stages of the development of ships, never 
fail to appeal to popular intelligence and imagina- 
tion. Indeed, many of the treasures of the Science 
Museum are irreplaceable in respect of value for the 
intellectual inspiration of the people. 
For the use of the Museum by the general public, 
larger space for exhibition and more ample gangways 
for the circulation of visitors are the most pressing 
needs ; but a suitable setting for the collections, and 
a worthy front and entrance to the building, are essential 
to the recognition of the real value of the Museum as 
_a factor in the intellectual machinery of the nation. 
Students and investigators who use the Museum need 
all these ; but they need more. The report of Sir 
Hugh Bell’s committee sets out the directions in which 
material facilities are required for the critical examina- 
tion of instruments, or for public or private exposition 
of objects, but until an adequate building is provided 
for the Museum collections these uses are seriously 
limited ; thus individuals and institutions interested 
in physical and applied science must wait for some 
years yet before they can enjoy the wider uses pointed 
out in the committee’s report. 
The deputation to the president of the Board of 
Education in 1909 pointed out that by far the largest 
part of the Science Collections come as gifts or loans, 
NO. 2800, VOL. 111] 
so that if an adequate and worthy building were 
provided, it need not be anticipated that the annual 
subsidy for purchases would be on the high scale 
required for the other great national museums and 
galleries. The maintenance vote is also relatively 
small, and the capital expenditure required for the 
building is not even now deterrent. It is not too 
much to expect that in these circumstances the work 
on the buildings will be pushed forward vigorously and 
without break. 

Meteorological Physics. 
The Air and its Ways: the Rede Lecture (1927) in the 
University of Cambridge, with other Contributions to 
Meteorology for Schools and Colleges. By Sir Napier 
Shaw. Pp. xx+237+28 plates. (Cambridge: at 
the University Press, 1923.) 3os. net. 
| N this volume Sir Napier Shaw has collected fifteen 
different lectures and papers upon a variety of 
different subjects, to a few only of which we can here 
refer. Throughout the whole book is a number of 
leading ideas, for which the author has been an 
indefatigable and mostly also a successful advocate, 
to the benefit of meteorological science. 
The first point which strikes the reader when he 
opens the book is twenty-four plates representing 
the normal distribution of the meteorological elements 
over the globe. Several of these charts are new from 
the author’s hand. By placing these charts at the 
beginning of the book, and by returning to them 
incessantly in discussing the special questions in the 
subsequent papers, the author has succeeded in em- 
phasising strongly his view of ‘“‘ the weather of any 
locality as part of the weather of the world.” Statistics 
can be made for a single locality. Atmospheric 
events, on the contrary, can never be understood 
from local, but only from universal points of view. 
To understand the phenomena of the weather means, 
according to Sir Napier Shaw, “ to bring our knowledge 
of the air into relation with the laws of physics, as 
established in the laboratory, and therefore particularly 
with the law of energy.’”’ We meet with this view 
already in the charmingly written first lecture, 
*“ Meteorology for Schools and Colleges,” and it follows 
us all through the book to the last lecture on “ The 
Artificial Control of the Weather.” An important 
consequence of this view of meteorology as applied 
physics forms the subject of the second lecture on 
* Pressure in Absolute Units.” 
Among the leading ideas of a more special meteoro- 
logical nature the author emphasises in the preface 
three as especially important—those of “ balanced 
