Marci'i 19, 1 908 J 



NATURE 



465 



lives being present on sucli occasions. Otiier- 

 wise there is a danger of their mathemalical teach- 

 ing running into a narrow groove. In regard to 

 future meeting-places of the congress, this matter is, 

 of course, decided at the final meeting in April, but 

 it may not be out of place to express the hope that 

 the congress of 1912 will be held somewhere within 

 the British Isles. G. H. Bryan, 



A^ 



PREHISTORIC CHEMISTRY. 

 NCIENT Egypt always exercises an intense 

 fascination for the student of the past, par- 

 ticularly as its written records are amplified by its 

 " human documents " in the shape of mummies. 

 This interest has, during the past few years, been 

 intensified by the valuable series of anatomical studies 

 on mummified remains which have issued from the 

 Government School of Medicine at Cairo under the 

 auspices of Prof. Elliot Smith. Not the least im- 

 portant of these is from the pen of Mr. W. A. 

 .Schmidt,' who has investigated mummified material 

 of different epochs from the chemical and biological 

 point of view. Some of the mummies he worked with 

 carry us back to prehistoric periods, 6000 years ago, 

 before the art of embalming as practised in later 

 times was known to the inhabitants of the Nile 

 valley. 



It is remarkable that, in spite of this lapse of 

 time, organic materials, which of all others are liable 

 to decay, should still manifest in the test-tube their 

 characteristic reactions. The presence of solid and 

 volatile fatty acids, proteins, and cholesterin, with 

 traces of intact fat, was demonstrable. The high 

 percentage of fatty acids leads the author to the 

 conclusion that they originate, not wholly from fat, 

 but mainly from the body proteins. The formation 

 of adipocere in the muscles of corpses left in water 

 or buried in damp soil was adduced by the French 

 observers in their work at the Morgue in Paris as 

 evidence of the possible conversion of protein into 

 fatty material. At the present time, however, the 

 doctrine of the metabolic change of protein into 

 tat is regarded with scepticism by most physiologists, 

 in spite of the large amount of fatty acid radicals 

 in the protein molecule. 



The mummy protein, although it retains the general 

 characters of albuminous material, has lost those 

 specific properties which enable us to distinguish 

 that of human origin from that which is found 

 in other parts of the animal kingdom. In other 

 words, it no longer gives what is termed the 

 " biological reaction." This is disappointing, 

 although it was doubtless e.xpected. Mr. Schmidt 

 also found that he could no longer detect haemoglobin, 

 and the substance regarded as blood by previous 

 observers was doubtless composed of coloured gum 

 and resin employed in embalming. In reference to 

 the process of embalming itself, he was unable to 

 find any soda ; the so-called natrium bath really con- 

 sisted of a solution of common salt. The old 

 Egyptians simply pickled their corpses in brine, and 

 the various balsams used were mere accessories which 

 could have exerted no real influence on the process 

 of mummification. The real agent at work here was 

 undoubtedly the extraordinarily dry climate of Egypt, 

 and it is this also which has acted as a preservative 

 of the organic material which can still be identified. 



The research reminds me of a small piece of work 

 which was carried out by Dr. Otto Rosenheim ' in 



• "Chemi«che und bio'oeische Untersuchufgen von iigyptischen Mumien" 

 material, nebst Betrachlungen iiber das E'n balsamieru esverfah en der 

 alter Aeypt^r." (OuhlNh d in Max VerwarnV Z«7irf. y: a/lg: Pkysiol., vol. 

 VII., pp. j6i>-392, 1907 ) 



- " Chiiin in the Carapace of the PUrygotus osUiensis from the Silurian 

 Rorks of Oesel" (Proc. Roy, Soc, vol. Ixitvi., B, pp. 398-400, 1905). 



NO. 2003, VOL. Jj'] 



my laboratory a few years ago. Small pieces of the 

 carapace of a fossil Eurypterid were placed at his 

 disposal by Sir E. Ray Lankester and Mr. Bather, of 

 the Natural History Museum, and he was able to 

 demonstrate in them the presence of chitin, their 

 organic substratum. In this case one was i^ealing 

 with prehistoric material compared with which an 

 Egyptian mummy is quite recent. This kind of work 

 appeals to the imagination, and one can only hope 

 that if it is continued, still further light and interest 

 will be thrown on the records of past ages. 



W. D. Halliburton. 



DR. H. C. SORBY, F.R.S. 

 r\N March 9, Dr. Henry Clifton Sorby, F.R.S., 

 ^^ died, aged eighty-two, at his residence in 

 Sheffield; The news of his death, although not un- 

 expected, was received in the city of steel with 

 profound regret, and those who had had the 

 privilege of knowing Dr. Sorby felt that science 

 had lost one of her greatest sons and that Sheffield 

 must now look back upon " another yesterday." It 

 is a little difficult for many of the inhabitants of 

 " steelopolis " to realise that never again can they 

 see the familiar figure hurrying along with bowed 

 head, or the grave face, with, in its eyes, that far- 

 off look which sees things beyond the ken of most 

 men. 



It is more than a little sad for those who could 

 venture to intercept him with a " Good morning. 

 Doctor," to know that never more can they receive 

 his semi-startled, ultra-courteous recognition and 

 hearty handshake, or again hear the cheery, almost 

 laughing "Good morning. How are you?" 



Combined with a complete absence of self-con- 

 sciousness, two great personal characteristics of Dr. 

 Sorby (which much handicapped him from the worldly 

 point of view of non-scientific honours) were modesty 

 and an immovable love of truth. The characteristic 

 last named somewhat dimmed the brilliancy and 

 lucidity of his papers, since in an enunciation he 

 could never bring himself to omit any possible or 

 even improbable qualification concerning the accuracy 

 of the particular theory he happened to be formu- 

 lating from his observed facts. 



As a speaker Dr. Sorby could not claim to be an 

 orator, but he had, nevertheless, a peculiar style all 

 his own, by means of which he fully convej'ed his 

 meaning to his sympathetic audiences. Dr. Sorby 

 belonged to a past generation of men of science the like 

 of whom the world will do well to breed again. He 

 loved science for her own sake, but so far from 

 holding the view that .science applied was science 

 degraded, his almost child-like pleasure on hearing 

 that some of his discoveries had been of practical 

 use in the great workaday world was good to see. 

 Dr. Sorby was not a family man, and though in ^asy 

 circumstances he- laboriously devoted his life to 

 scientific research. The fact that those services to 

 science were never adequateh' rewarded remains a 

 permanent disgrace to the powers that be. 



Turning from personal matters to the works of 

 this great man of science, the writer is confronted by 

 the fact that he must attempt the impossible task of 

 compressing into a few hundred words an account 

 of the labours of a versatile genius spread over a 

 period of nearly sixty years, and embodied in about 

 240 papers, a number which, taking into considera- 

 tion the length of Sorby's scientific life, corresponds 

 to an average of four papers per annum. 



His first research on sulphur and phosphorus in 

 agricultural crops was published in 1847; his last 

 paper on geology was written a few months before 

 his death. 



