346 



NA TURE 



[January 20, 1910 



We have received from the United States Department 

 of Agriculture Bureau of Soils a bulletin, by Dr. Whitnej', 

 summarising the results of nearly 3000 manurial trials on 

 cotton soils made during the past twenty-one years. The 

 general conclusion is that complete fertihsers give the 

 largest and, as a rule, the most profitable crop. The 

 increase in yield due to mixtures of artificial manures was 

 approximately an additive effect, an interesting result that 

 deserves further examination. A report is also issued on 

 the Volusia soils, which cover an area of more than ten 

 million acres in southern New York, northern Pennsyl- 

 vania, and north-eastern Ohio, and are commonly said to 

 be "worn out," the farms in some localities having been 

 abandoned. It is well illustrated and typical of the soil 

 survey work carried out by the department. The soils 

 suffer from lack of drainage, poor physical condition, and 

 depletion of organic matter, conditions for which suitable 

 remedies are suggested. 



We have received advance chapters of the annual report 

 on the mineral production of Canada during the calendar 

 years 1907 and igo8, dealing respectively with the pro- 

 duction of coal, coke and peat, of natural gas and 

 petroleum, and of iron and steel in the Dominion. These 

 reports show a steady but not a great development in all 

 these branches of mineral industry ; the production of coal 

 in the two years in question was respectively 10,511,426 

 and 10,886,311 tons, as against 9,762,601 tons in 1906, 

 about one-eighth of this being made into coke; the produc- 

 tion of peat was practically nil. The production of crude 

 petroleum was 788,872 barrels (of 35 gallons) in 1907 

 and 527,987 barrels in igo8 ; the production of natural gas 

 was also important. The production of pig iron is about 

 stationary, being 651,962 tons in 1907 and 630,835 tons in 

 1908, about one-sixth in each case being smelted from 

 native and the remainder from imported ores. 



Mr. R. a. Stewart Mac.alister, by permission of the 

 committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, for whom 

 the materials were originally collected, contributes to the 

 number of the Journal of the Gj-psy-lore Society for 

 October, 1909, the first of a series of papers on the 

 language of the Nawar or Zutt, the nomad smiths of 

 Palestine. The language is in its basis pure Romani, but 

 it has assimilated many Arabic words, that is to say, not 

 literary Arabic, but the colloquial dialect of Palestine. 

 Some words are used without change, but a large number 

 have become naturalised in Nuri, either indicating that 

 they are survivals of a period when the tribe had newly 

 arrived in Arabic-speaking lands, or that some terms have 

 been modified with the object of secrecy to adapt them 

 for use in the tribal argot. Mr. Macalister works out 

 carefully the method of making these modifications. It is 

 to be regretted that few of the stories so far published 

 include any interesting or characteristic folk-lore material, 

 most of the examples being incidents of everyday life or 

 scraps of folk-tales dictated by the compiler. 



An excellent general account, by Dr. H. R. Mill, of the 

 rainfall of the British Isles in 1909, in relation to other 

 years, is contained in the Times of January 14, based 

 upon a preliminary study of some 2000 of the returns of 

 the British Rainfall Organisation, and on a comparison of 

 100 long-established records, distributed as uniformly as 

 possible over the country, with their own averages for 

 1870-99. These latter values are given in tabular form, 

 and the summary of the percentages shows considerable 

 differences in various divisions ; in Scotland, as a whole, 

 the annual rainfall was practically normal ; in Ireland 

 and Wales there was a deficiency of 5 per cent., in the 

 NO. 2099, VOL. 82] 



north of England a considerable excess, while the amount 

 over the British Isles generally was exactly the average. 

 These results naturally agree in the main with those given 

 by the Meteorological Office in its annual summary 

 (Nature, January 6). The best idea of the difference of 

 the annual rainfall of the year from the average is shown 

 by a neat little map. This exhibits conspicuous dry areas 

 in the e.Ktreme south-west of Ireland, Wales, and England, 

 and in the north-west of Scotland. The distinctly wet 

 regions, with more than 10 per cent, above the average, 

 surround the south and east of Great Britain ; another 

 area with more than 10 per cent, was in Lincoln, the 

 north-east of Yorkshire, and Lancashire. The wettest 

 months, generally speaking, were March, April, October, 

 and December. November was unquestionably the driest 

 month ; over the whole of England the rainfall was only 

 one-third of the normal. Dr. Mill remarks that the year 

 probably acquired its undeserved reputation for wetness 

 from the chilly gloom of some of the summer months, 

 which both looked and felt far wetter than they were. 



Messrs. Teubner are issuing in pamphlet form some of 

 the most important of the public addresses which have 

 been delivered by distinguished German physicists during 

 the last few years. Amongst them is one on electrons, 

 given by Prof. W. Wien before the Versammlung deutscher 

 Naturforscher, which has already reached a second edition. 

 It deals in a clear and interesting way with the rise and 

 progress of our knowledge of the properties of electrons, 

 and explains the methods by means of which that know- 

 ledge has been acquired, without making a great demand 

 on the reader's mathematical powers. Prof. Wien prefers 

 the theory which makes an electron in motion take a 

 spheroidal shape to that on which electrons are rigid 

 spheres, and shows in his additions to the present edition 

 that the evidence from the principle of relativity supports 

 this view. A special difliculty of the electron theory is, in 

 his opinion, that of explaining how an electron holds 

 together under -the enormous repulsive forces which the 

 parts of it exert on each other. 



The ]o)irnal de Physique for December, 1909, contains 

 a paper communicated to the Soci^t^ fran^aise de Physique 

 on November 19 by M. L. Houllevigue, in which the sizes 

 of the particles shot off from a silver kathode in a vacuum 

 tube are calculated. The method depends on the fact that 

 when a vapour condenses on a surface colder than itself 

 the drops form at definite points of the surface constant 

 in number, and if evaporated and re-condensed form again 

 at the same points. When a glass surface has been ex- 

 posed to bombardment from the kathode rays, the author 

 considers that the points at which condensation of a vapour 

 occurs are those at which particles of the kathode have 

 become attached to the glass. The number of these points, 

 and therefore of the kathode particles, is proportional to 

 the time of exposure to the bombardment, and may be 

 counted directly under the microscope after mercury vapour 

 has condensed on them. The thickness of a deposit may 

 then be found by Fizeau's method after the film has been 

 exposed .to the vapour of iodine. From the volume of the 

 deposit on any area and the number of particles calculated 

 from the counting experiment, M. Houllevigue finds the 

 volume of the particle shot off from a silver kathode to 

 be about 7X10-" cubic millimetres, that is, it consists 

 of about 20 million molecules. 



For several years the Scottish Provident Institution, 

 Edinburgh, has issued, within the covers of a blotter, an 

 excellent set of star-maps, by Mr. W. B. Blaikie, showing 

 the constellations visible when facing north and south 



