432 

COTTON FOR GERMAN AMMUNITION. 
HE appointment of Mr. Lloyd George as 
Minister of Munitions is a sign that the 
reconstituted Government has at length realised 
the serious importance of ammunition in warfare. 
The complement of Mr. George’s work will now 
surely be the exclusion of materials of ammuni- 
tion from our enemies. It is now many months 
since Mr. Runciman, President of the Board of 
Trade, whose special mission was to deal with 
commerce with the enemy, was implored to place 
cotton and cotton goods on the list of contraband ; 
it was urged that only by this course could the 
German troops be deprived of ammunition. But 
the attitude of mind which induced Mr. Runciman, 
some years ago, in criticising Lord Roberts’ 
efforts to bring the nation to apprehend the danger 
which menaced us, to wish to “apologise to our 
good friends the Germans,” appeared to have per- 
sisted. After much pressure, the Order in Council 
of March 14 was issued, apparently excluding 
cotton. The effect was nil. Cotton still poured 
into Germany, as appeared from returns chronicled 
in the Times of June 10, in answer to a Parlia- 
mentary question, where enormous increases in 
the exports of cotton and yarns into Sweden, 
Norway, Denmark, and the Netherlands in the 
figures for April, 1915, over those for April, 
Ig14, were reported. Imports might have been 
stopped at once had cotton been declared contra- 
band of war. 
It is to be regarded as most unfortunate that 
Sir Edward Grey, in his letter to Dr. Page on 
January 14, gave the promise: “His Majesty’s 
Government have never put cotton on the list of 
contraband ; they have throughout the war kept it 
on the free list; and on every occasion, when ques- 
tioned on the point, they have stated their inten- 
tion of adhering to the practice.” It is not going 
too far to say that this decision has, and will, cost 
Britain and her Allies many thousands of lives. 
The supreme tragedy of this war is that while 
the patriotic and unselfish citizens of the Empire 
are risking all to save the world from German 
domination, our Government has been contribut- 
ing to their destruction. To fight the enemy 
abroad is necessary, and calls for the utmost exer- 
tion of the manliest of our race; but to have to 
fight an enemy at home leads us to despair of 
victory. Even yet, cotton is entering Germany; 
and I learn from French sources that African wood 
(“ogoubi”’) and Norwegian wood pulp are being 
tried by the Germans as substitutes. These must 
all be declared contraband ; that step, and that step 
alone, will deal a final blow to the enemy. 
WiiiraAM Ramsay. 

MR. Bi. NEVE EE hares - 
Y the death, in his sixty-eighth year, of Mr. 
I. H. Neville, at Letchworth, on June 5, 
the scientific world, and metallurgists in par- 
ticular, have to mourn the loss of a singularly 
gifted. man and a most charming personality. 
Neville took his degree in the Mathematical 
NO. 2381, VOL. 95] 
NATURE 
[JUNE 17, 1915 

Tripos of 1871, when he was bracketed fifteenth 


wrangler. He was elected a Fellow of Sidney 
Sussex College, Cambridge, in the same year. 
The bent of his mind was, however, in the direc- 
tion of experimental science rather than mathe- 
matics, and early in 1880 he took over the 
management of the chemical laboratory at his 
college. 
About 1888, the work of Raoult on the lowering 
of the freezing points of solutions was brought 
prominently into notice, and it occurred to 
Neville and Mr. C. T. Heycock to see if the same 
laws applied to metallic solutions. A first paper 
was read before the Chemical Society on June 3, 
1889, on the lowering of the freezing point of tin 
by the addition of other metals, in which it was 
shown that, as regards a metal like tin, the effect 
of dissolving other metals was generally the same, 
so far as the freezing point was concerned, as in 
the case of aqueous and other solutions. After 
the first paper was published, more extended ex- 
periments were made, great trouble being caused 
by the rapid shift of zero of the mercury thermo- 
meters. With the assistance of Prof. Callendar 
and Principal E. H. Griffiths, Neville and Heycock 
were able to use the platinum resistance pyro- 
meter, and from that time the thermal work was 
comparatively rapid and accurate. The investi- 
gations on alloys were continued with but slight 
intervals up to the autumn of last year, but by 
far the heaviest piece of work, both thermal and 
microscopical, was on the alloys of tin and copper; 
this formed the subject of the Bakerian Lecture. 
In 1897 Neville was elected a Fellow of the 
Royal Society. No one -knows better than the 
present writer how large a part Neville took in 
all the researches with which he was jointly 
associated, or how he could bring a mind trained 
in mathematical precision to bear on his scientific 
work. Only those who have dealt with the com- 
plex problems of alloys can appreciate the diffi- 
culty of disentangling the maze of experimental 
results and sifting out the good from the worth- 
less, and so preventing the main problem from 
getting side-tracked. 
Those who‘had the privilege of knowing Neville 
well were aware that he was a man of many 
gifts and wide reading—an excellent French, 
German, and Italian scholar, an authority on 
Italian history, and deeply interested in meta- 
physical speculations. 
A more modest man, or one who had less push, 
in the worldly sense, it would be impossible to 
find. His death has left a deep gap, which his 
friends know well they will never be able to fill. 
NOTES. 
In reply to a question asked in the House of Com- 
mons on June 14, it was announced that the Board of 
Trade had decided to dispense with the wool test for 
colour-blindness from January 1 next. 
Mr. J. B. Tyrret1, of Toronto, was elected presi- 
dent of the Geological Section of the Royal Society of 
Canada at its annual meeting held in Ottawa on 
May 
2=-27 
Se fD 

