NATURE 



[April 17, 19 13 



will not bear comparison with the technical high schools 

 of Germany, either as regards number of students 

 or nature of the instruction. The total number of day 

 technical students in English polytechnics, technical 

 schools, and colleges, and in universities and univer- 

 sity colleges recognised as technical institutions by 

 the Board of Education, is about 4000 ; and 

 less than one-fifth have passed a university matricula- 

 tion examination or its equivalent upon entrance. Less 

 than 2000 day students are taking full courses 

 of instruction in technical institutions in England and 

 Wales, though this number includes students of tech- 

 nology in several provincial universities or university 

 colleges. The technical high schools of Germany and 

 Zurich have together more than six times as many day 

 students taking full four-year courses, after having 

 completed a full secondary-school course and obtained 

 the leaving certificate. If the same standard were re- 

 quired for entrance to our technical institutions, most 

 of them would cease to exist. 



Our position as regards university students is 

 equally unsatisfactory when compared with that of 

 Germany." In the whole of the universities of Eng- 

 land, including Oxford and Cambridge, there are 

 about 17,000 full-time students, whereas Germany 

 has four times as many. The University of Berlin 

 alone has 10,000 matriculated students ; Leipzig 5000 ; 

 Bonn, Breslau, and Halle more than 3000 each, and 

 six other universities more than 2000. We have a 

 long journey to make before we can approach the 

 position occupied by Germany as regards secondary, 

 technical, or university education, and it is the State 

 which must take the lead if we are to make up our 

 leeway. The first requirement is to organise our 

 educational institutions into a truly national system ; 

 that is to say, upon a system which has the well-being 

 of the nation as its main object, and in which facilities 

 are offered to every individual to secure the highest 

 instruction if he is qualified to take advantage of it. 



The raising of the leaving age of elementary schools, 

 the abolition of the "half-time" svstem, the establish- 

 ment of compulsory continuation schools, and the 

 coordination of elementary and secondary schools are 

 reforms for which England ought no longer to wait, 

 but of greater importance from the point of view of 

 national progress is the development of higher tech- 

 nological instruction and research in our technical 

 colleges and universities. The importance of this 

 was emphasised by Mr. H. G. Wells in three articles 

 contributed to The Daily Mail on April 7, S, and Q. 

 Mr. Wells's theme was the nature of our naval and 

 military armaments and the national expenditure upon 

 these preparations for war ; and he urged that too 

 much confidence is placed in obsolescent instruments 

 of destruction and far too little encouragement given 

 to organised technical research, military and naval 

 experiment, and other means bv which a secure posi- 

 tion can be obtained bv the aid of science. " I will 

 suggest," he said, " that we have the courage to re- 

 strain and even to curtail our monstrous outlay upon 

 war material, and that we begin to spend lavishlv 

 upon military and naval education and training, upon 

 laboratories and experiment stations, upon chemical and 

 physical research, and all that makes for knowledge 

 and leading, and that we increase our expenditure 

 upon these things as fast as we can up to ten or 

 twelve millions a year." The arts of peace, no less 

 than those of war, require the production of as manv 

 hichlv educated, inventive, investigating men as the 

 nation can obtain from all classes of the communitv. 

 Thp future of every modern State depends upon the 

 work of its men of science and engineers. Let us 

 hope that this will not be forgotten when the Govern- 

 ives attention to the oreanisation of education, 



NO. 2268, VOL. 91] 



and that consideration will be given not only to the 



acquisition of knowledge by students of various 

 grades, but also to its increase. 



R. A. Gregory. 



VARIATIONS IN ATMOSPHERIC CIRCU- 

 LATION IN TEMPERATE LATITUDES. 

 P)R. A. DEFANT contributes a long paper to the 

 *-J Sitzungsberichte der K. Akad. der Wiss. in Wien, 

 March, 1912, in which he discusses the variations in 

 the meteorological elements in temperate latitudes in 

 both hemispheres. In an introductory section he out- 

 lines the theoretical conclusions on which he bases his 

 method of investigation. Briefly stated, they are as 

 follows. If a region is a region of rising pressure, 

 a " Steig-gebiet " in the nomenclature of Ekholm, the 

 mean temperature of the atmosphere is below normal, 

 and vice-versa if it is a region of falling pressure ; but 

 the precipitation is a maximum if the temperature of 

 the atmosphere is above the normal over the region, 

 and a minimum if the temperature is below the 

 normal. Consequently oscillations in the precipitation 

 correspond with oscillations in the variation of pres- 

 sure, and if the first are periodic, the second will have 

 the same periods. 



The argument is ingenious, and would be unques- 

 tionably valid if the correlations were complete, but 

 the question naturally suggests itself : " Why not in- 

 vestigate directly the records of pressure, which is less 

 subject to local influences than is the amount of rain- 

 fall?" The paper appears to contain no adequate 

 reason against adopting the direct method, but as 

 rainfall is a more important climatic factor than pres- 

 sure, the results of the investigation have an interest 

 of their own, apart from the theoretical development. 

 The author has taken the daily weather reports for 

 South America and Australia for the year 1904, added 

 together the published values of rainfall for each day 

 for all stations, and taken the total so obtained to 

 represent the daily rainfall of the region considered. 

 The totals are then written down in series, and the 

 number of maxima during the year is counted and 

 divided into the number of days. In this way an 

 approximate period is obtained. The variation of this 

 period is then eliminated, and the process repeated to 

 give the next period. The method is clearly a rough 

 one, and some discussion of the significance of the 

 periods obtained appears to be necessary. Neverthe- 

 less, the results are interesting, and suggest that the 

 application of Schuster's method of analysis to the 

 search for comparatively short periods would repay the 

 labour involved. Defant obtains periods of about' 

 seven, twelve, sixteen, and thirty-one days for the 

 southern hemisphere, and by using the values for 

 1909 finds corresponding periods of about six, thirteen, 

 and twenty-five days in Europe. It may be noted 

 that Turner found evidence of a period of twenty-five 

 days in his analysis of the Greenwich records. 



Using some results of Exner's on the effect of the 

 different thermal conditions over land and water, the 

 author finds that a continent is the source of a series 

 of pressure waves which travel from west to east with 

 a velocity independent of the wave-length, and he 

 connects this series of pressure waves with the varia- 

 tion nf rainfall. The most important waves are those 

 of which the lengths in degrees of longitude are 360 , 

 180 , 120 , &c, while next in importance are those of 

 which the length is half the width of a continent or 

 ocean. Their velocity is about n° of longitude per 

 day in the southern hemisphere, I4'5° per day in the 

 northern. It is clear that if the results of the author's 

 investigations are valid, they will be of great import- 

 ance in long-distance forecasting. E. Gold. 



