890 
Caprain R. AMUNDSEN has abandoned his pro- 
jected flight from Alaska across the Pole to Spits- 
bergen. The Times reports that an official com- 
munication to this effect has been issued by the 
Admiral commanding the Norwegian fleet. The 
statement is made that a trial flight on May 11 proved 
very unsatisfactory. In full expectation of the flight 
being attempted in the third week in June, the 
Norwegian Government had sent the Faym to 
Spitsbergen with supplies, and the transport Flint, 
carrying three seaplanes, arrived at King’s Bay in 
the middle of June. The seaplanes were to patrol 
the edge of the polar pack to the north and north- 
west of Spitsbergen in order to render assistance to 
Captain Amundsen and his pilot, Lieut. O. Omdal, 
in the case of any enforced descent. It was proposed, 
if the distribution of the pack rendered it advisable, 
to deposit supplies of petrol and food on the ice, each 
marked with a conspicuous beacon. 
‘“ NaTIONAL Baby Week,’’ which is to be observed 
on July 1-7 under the auspices of the National Baby 
Week Council, 117 Piccadilly, W.1, brings into 
prominence the many problems of infant mortality. 
These problems have two phases which seem de- 
pendent upon biological conditions: (1) the com- 
paratively high death-rate in the first month of life, 
and (2) the comparatively high death-rate of male 
infants as compared with female infants. In the 
year 1921, the most recent for which detailed figures 
are available, there were 1051 male births for every 
tooo female births, while the deaths of male infants 
occurred at the rate of 92°85 per 1000 births and 
female infants at 72°16 per 1oo0o. During the first 
four weeks of life, the ‘‘ neo-natal’’ period, the death- 
rate was 40°01 for males and 30°27 for females per 
tooo births. These ratios stand with little variation 
year by year, though during and after the War the 
ratio of male to female births —as was expected on 
an empirical basis from historical records alone— | 
was slightly higher than the normal (104 males to 
1oo females). It would seem that this greater 
susceptibility to the strains of environment is 
characteristic of the male sex. The neo-natal death- 
rate, which has yielded but little to those influences 
which have proved so effectual in lowering the infant 
mortality rate as a whole (from 154 per 1000 births 
in 1900 to 77 in 1922), constitutes another difficult 
problem in public health. An interesting recent 
investigation (by post-mortems) into the causes of 
death in sixty-two cases of neo-natal mortality showed 
that while 73 per cent. were due to conceivably 
preventable conditions, the remaining 27 per cent. 
were due to malformations—a finding which might 
seem to indicate that neo-natal mortality may be 
but the expression in human life of Nature’s trial 
and error—a biological interpretation which would, 
however, tend to discourage infant welfare discussions 
on this subject in the forthcoming “ National Baby 
Week.” 
In the current number of the Poetry Review, Mr. 
Oliver C. de C. Ellis has a lively and cheering article 
attacking the fallacy that there is any opposition 
NO. 2800, VOL. 111] 
NATURE 

[JUNE 30, 1923 
between poetry and science. He might very well 
have gone further than he has. It would be truer to 
say that the highest gifts in poetry are closely akin 
to, or even identical with, those required for the 
highest achievements in science. Some of the greatest 
poets, Dante, for example, have,been masters of the 
science of their time, and Wordsworth, in a famous 
passage in the preface to his second edition of the 
‘Lyrical Ballads,’ looks forward to a time when 
modern science, having entered into the mental equip- 
ment of all cultivated men, will inspire a new order of 
poetry, as philosophy and rural lore inspired Lucretius 
and Virgil and medieval science inspired Dante. Both 
orders of mental effort depend, as Mr. Ellis says, 
upon the imagination, but whereas the man of 
science imagines laws and relations of things which 
may be verified and used for guidance as to their 
own future action, the poet sees them in their relation 
to the human soul. In this sense the work of the 
man of science is objective and stands on the order 
of events; the work of the poet is subjective or 
moral, and depends for its appreciation upon a state 
of mind attuned to his own. ‘“ Poetry,’’ as Words- 
worth tells us, ‘‘ is the wealth and fine spirit of all 
knowledge”’; ‘“‘it is the impassioned expression 
which is in the countenance of all science.’’ And, 
one must add, that whereas science aims at pure 
truth, poetry, having this emotional content, aims 
also at giving pleasure. It implies a certain form 
and a certain emotional effect, though the substance 
must also be truth. It is the “ first and last of all 
knowledge.” 
Ture British Mycological Society is organising a 
phytopathological excursion to Wye, in Kent, on 
Saturday, July 7. Those intending to take part in 
the excursion should communicate with Capt. J. 
Ramsbottom, at the British Museum (Natural His- 
tory), South Kensington, S.W.7, by Wednesday, 
July 4. 
AccorDING to the Chemikery Zeitung for June, Dr. 
Paul Knoller, lecturer and assistant at the University 
of Freiburg (Switzerland), has been appointed 
professor of mineralogy and petrography at Dayton 
University, Ohio. 
Ow1nc to the increase in the work of the Rotham- 
sted Experimental Station, it has been decided to 
appoint an assistant director, and Dr. B. A. Keen, 
head of the Physics Department, has been selected 
for this position. 
A circuLar tablet of blue glazed ware bearing the 
inscription ‘‘ James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1870), 
Physicist, lived here,’’ has been affixed to 16 Palace 
Gardens Terrace, Kensington, where Clerk Maxwell 
resided for a time, by the London County Council. 
Maxwell’s occupation of the house probably dated 
from the latter part of 1860, immediately after his 
appointment to King’s College, or the early part of 
1861. The first reference to it in his biography by 
Campbell and Garnett is in a letter dated May 21, 
1861. He resigned his appointment as from Easter, 
1865, and left the house for good in March 1866 
(ibid. p. 260). 

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