5 2 4 



NATURE 



[October 19, 191 1 



consequently many of the seams of coal are accessible 

 by means of day-levels. The present writer would 

 have thought that a greater thickness than six feet of 

 coal could have been attributed, at any rate to the 

 seams in the Nanaimo coalfield, as the Douglas seam 

 occurs in the form of lenticular masses, the maximum 

 thickness of which attains as much as twenty-six and 

 twenty-eight feet at some points, and as the Welling- 

 ton seam, which underlies it at a depth of seven 

 hundred to one thousand feet, is from three to six 

 feet thick. 



The following analyses will serve to show the char- 

 acter of the bituminous coals referred to above : — 



Klk River 

 per cent. per cent. per cent. 



Moisture i'47 ■•• 4' 6 ° ••• °'&7 



Volatile combustible matter 28-19 •■■ 337° ■•■ 2 3'" 



Fixed carbon 64-05 ... 54-70 ... 70-70 



Ash 6-29 ... 7-00 ... 5-32 



The proportions of all these constituents vary in 

 each of the coalfields, the moisture attaining in some 

 cases as much as 7 per cent., volatile combustible 

 matter more than 40 per cent., and ash 10 percent, and 

 more. Some of the seams make good coke, when the 

 proportion of moisture is low enough (not exceeding 

 2 per cent.). 



The produce of the Vancouver Island Collieries is in 

 demand along the western coast of America ; that of 

 the Elk River Collieries supplies smelting works in 

 the United States, railways, and so on. 



The produce of the Skeena River Collieries will have 

 about 180 miles to travel to the coast at Prince Rupert, 

 and will thereafter have to compete with the bitu- 

 minous coals of Vancouver and some of the other 

 islands along the coast, which can ship their coal 

 directly into the holds of the ships which use it. 



It is to be hoped that in the great field the existence 

 of which has been foreshadowed, some of the supposed 

 anthracite will be found to contain at least 12 per 

 cent, volatile combustible matter, as " drier " coals and 

 true anthracites, containing from 3 per cent, to 6 per 

 cent., are not considered suitable for steam-raising 

 purposes in European countries, on account of their 

 slow rate of combustion, 'although Pennsylvanian 

 anthracite seems to be quite acceptable in some parts 

 of the United States. 



DR. HUGHL1NGS JACKSON, F.R.S. 



THE recent death of Dr. Hughlings Jackson has 

 called forth that widespread recognition amongst 

 men of science which his modesty and retiring nature 

 rendered impossible during his lifetime. To many, 

 and particularly to workers in scientific fields remote 

 from medicine, his name is unknown, and yet, 

 although he never performed an experiment, no one 

 man has so profoundly influenced the growth of our 

 knowledge of the functions of the nervous system. 



John Hughlings Jackson was born in 1835, at 

 Green Hamerton, in Yorkshire, and began the study 

 of medicine at York. After a short period as a 

 student at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, he became 

 qualified to practise medicine in 1856, and then re- 

 turned to York for two years as house-surgeon to the 

 dispensary. In 1862 he was appointed assistant 

 physician to the National Hospital for the Paralysed 

 and Epileptic, and in 1863 he became assistant 

 physician to the London Hospital. These are the mate- 

 rial facts in Dr. Jackson's outwardly uneventful life. 



At the National Hospital he came in contact with 

 two men. who influenced the direction of his thoughts, 

 Hrown-St^quard, from whom he acquired a knowledge 

 of the recent work of French physiologists, and Lock- 

 hart Clarke, whose beautiful microscopic preparations 

 NO. 219O, VOL. 87] 



taught him the minute anatomy of the nervous 

 system. But in his early lectures, delivered between 

 1S64 and 1868, he showed how quickly he had found 

 that path which was to lead him by consecutive 

 steps to his greatest generalisations. In 1864 he had 

 already shown that paralysis of the right half of the 

 body was associated, in most cases, with loss of 

 speech, and characteristically gave the whole credit 

 to Broca, whose work had appeared shortly before 

 his lecture. Broca's observations were essentially 

 anatomical, and are still the subject of dispute, but 

 Jackson described forms of disturbed speech associated 

 with hemiplegia, which stand untouched to-day. In 

 1866, he formulated the condition now known as 

 apraxia, and repeatedly demonstrated cases of this 

 disturbance to his pupils in the wards of the hospital. 

 But he was forty years before his time, and apraxia 

 was not generally recognisecL^ntil its rediscovery by 

 Continental observers. 



At that time all work on the functions of the 

 nervous system was dominated by the brilliant dis- 

 coveries of the French School of Physiology, and 

 Jackson's idea that convulsions arose from some 

 change in the cerebrum and usually from a focus 

 within the territory of the Sylvian artery was passed 

 over in contemptuous silence. But when Hitzig and 

 Fritsch showed, in 1870, that stimulation of the cortex 

 could produce movements, Jackson's views came to 

 the front, and local convulsions are now called by his 

 name. 



Step by step we can watch the growth of his great 

 generalisation put forward in the Croonian lectures of 

 1884 on " Evolution and Dissolution of the Nervous 

 System." He showed that in hemiplegia movements 

 and not muscles were affected, for the brain is not deal- 

 ing with tools but with functions. Thence he passed 

 to the idea of " levels " in the nervous system, each 

 of which represented a higher evolution; passage from 

 one level to that above it was always from the general 

 to the special in function, and from the simple to the 

 complex in structure. Dissolution produced by disease 

 or by experiment occurred in the inverse order, and 

 the removal of the highest level set free the activities 

 of those below. To this view Jackson gave the widest 

 application, and explained the rigidity of limbs 

 paralysed from cerebral disease by the over-action of 

 uncontrolled centres in the cerebellum and spinal cord. 

 So far back as 1877, he laid down that "the cere- 

 bellum is the centre for continuous movements and 

 the cerebrum for changing movements," and so 

 formulated the modern doctrine of the tonic nature of 

 cerebellar activity. 



These wide-reaching generalisations have not yet 

 received their full application, but they permeate 

 modern neurology ; and the position of the English 

 School is due largely to Dr. Jackson's stimulating 

 influence and generous self-effacement. H. H. 



AUGUSTE MICHEL LEVY. 



ON September 25, Auguste Michel Levy, director 

 of the Geological Survey of France, and In- 

 spector-General of Mines, died in his sixty-eighth year. 

 His work, which has had so wide an influence, covered 

 the whole period of the rise of modern petrology. 

 The systematic grouping of rocks was largely 

 a French study at the opening of the nineteenth 

 century; Michel L6vy carried on the tradition into far 

 broader fields by concerning himself witli (heir natural 

 relationships and modes of origin. The great memoir 

 entitled "Mineralogie micrographique ; Roches erup- 

 tives franchises," in which he was associated with 

 his master Fouque. appeared in 1879, and showpd 

 how the methods of Sorby had been appreciated in 



