January 27, 1910J 



NA TURE 



385 



there are not enough of them yet to do more than touch 

 the fringe of the subject. Scientific agriculture must begin 

 to be taught ai.d learned at all the primary schools in 

 India, every pupil being practically instructed by means 

 of gardens' attached to each school. The agricultural 

 education of the people must be put in the foreground of 

 the endeavours of the Government and of all the educa- 

 tional authorities. Experiments at the Government farms 

 have shown that with selected seed and proper treatment 

 an acre can be made to yield, on an average, from 50 to 

 100 per cent, more than it does at present. To take an 

 instance, the average output of wheat in India is only 

 from nine to ten bushels per acre. In Great Britain it is 

 more than thirty. To raise the average in India even to 

 fifteen bushels is surely not beyond the reach of science. 

 The same remarks might be made in regard to all the 

 food crops. An attainable 50 per cent, more, when 

 realised, would go far to banish scarcity and famine from 

 the land. 



Prof. Rudolf Tombo, jun., of Columbia University, 

 contributed to Science of December 24 last an article deal- 

 ing with university registration statistics in the United 

 States. The returns are given for twenty-eight of the lead- 

 ing universities, three institutions having been added to 

 the list this year, viz. Te.xas, Tulane, and Washington (St. 

 Louis). In igog* four universities — Iowa, Minnesota, New 

 York, and Y'ale — showed a loss in enrolment compared with 

 the previous year, as against two universities in 1908 and 

 five in 1907. On the whole, there were considerable gains, 

 the increase in several instances being quite marked. The 

 greatest gains were made during the year by Columbia, 

 Chicago, Wisconsin, California, Cornell, Ohio, and 

 Pennsylvania, in the order named, each one of these having 

 gained more than 300 students. Columbia was the only 

 university to register an increase of above 400 students in 

 1909, whereas there were no fewer than eight in igoS. 

 For the second time in the history of American universi- 

 ties the 6000 mark was exceeded, Columbia having a total 

 enrolment in 1909 of 6132 students. Harvard having 

 registered 6013 in 1903. Harvard continues to lead in the 

 number of male academic students, being followed by 

 Yale, Princeton, Michigan, Chicago, Wisconsin, Columbia, 

 and Minnesota. A general depression occurred in the case 

 of the engineering schools, Stanford being the only institu- 

 tion to exhibit a noteworthy gain. The important schools 

 of agriculture showed an increase, the single exception 

 being Minnesota. The article concludes with an individual 

 examination of the statistics of the more important of the 

 universities. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 



London. 

 Royal Society, Janunrv 20. — Sir Archibald Geikie, 

 K.C.B., president, in the chair.- — Dr. C. Bolton: Further 

 observations on the pathology of gastric ulcer (progress 

 report). In four previous papers the production and 

 properties of gastro-toxic serum, obtained by immunising 

 the rabbit with guinea-pig's gastric cells, were described, 

 and it was demonstrated that the ulcers produced by the 

 serum healed within three or four weeks if the animal 

 were in its normal condition and fed on a normal diet. 

 Since chronic gastric ulcer in the human subject is a 

 common malady, and gastric ulceration is initially acute, 

 it was considered that some unknown condition or condi- 

 tions must be present which delay the healing of these 

 ulcers. It was, however, found on experiment that so long 

 as the stomach emptied itself in the normal time it was 

 impossible to delay the healing of gastric ulcer by increased 

 or diminished acidity of the gastric contents or by feeding 

 on infected food; the position of the ulcer in the stomach 

 did not materially affect the result. The present com- 

 munication deals with the effects of interference with the 

 motor function of the stomach upon the healing of ulcer, 

 the food and acidity of the stomach contents being normal. 

 The gastric ulcers were produced in the cat by the local 

 injection of gastro-toxic serum into the stomach wall, the 

 serum being prepared by immunising the goat with the 

 gastric cells of the cat. Motor insufficiency of the stomach, 

 leading to retention of its contents, which is one of the 

 NO. 2100. VOL. 82] 



commonest forms of indigestion of food in man, was pro- 

 duced by constricting the pylorus of the cat by means of 

 rubber tubing, the ulcer then being formed on the anterior 

 wall of the stomach. It was found that in these circum- 

 stances the healing of the ulcers w-as delayed for at least 

 twice the normal time. The ulcers, however, eventually 

 healed up, but the regenerated mucous membrane was of 

 a lower type than normal. Thus it may consist on the 

 forty-first day of a single layer of cubical cells such as 

 should be found on the tenth day of normal healing, or 

 of glands formed entirely of duct epithelium. It was 

 further found that the more sclerotic the base of the scar 

 the more badly developed was the mucous membrane. In 

 certain cases the normal healing of the ulcers was occasion- 

 ally delayed by necrosis of the granulation tissue forming 

 their bases, or by excessive formation of fibrous tissue, 

 and in these cases the mucous membrane was of the lower 

 type. It was therefore considered that the delay in heal- 

 ing in motor insufficiency was an exaggeration of the 

 condition occasionally seen in the normal state. Both con- 

 ditions are due to digestion or irritation of the base of the 

 ulcer, leading to necrosis or increased formation of fibrous 

 tissue, so that the regenerated mucous membrane is either 

 unable to grow over it at all or only consists of a single 

 layer of cells or of glands of a lower type than normal. 

 When the base is excessively fibrous the glands have not 

 a sufficiently vascular and cellular stroma in which to 

 proliferate. — Dr. G. Dreyer and J. Sholto C. Douglas : 

 The velocity of reaction in the " absorption " of specific 

 agglutinins by bacteria, and in the " adsorption " of 

 agglutinins, trypsin, and sulphuric acid by animal charcoal. 

 Though a fair number of observations exist as to the in- 

 fluence of time on the so-called adsorption processes, e.g. 

 the adsorption of a dye by a fibre (Bordet, Bayliss, &c.) 

 proving that it takes a very considerable time before 

 equilibrium is reached, the study of the time reaction in 

 the taking up of agglutinins by bacteria has been confined 

 to the observations of Eisenberg and Volk. These authors 

 maintain that the velocity of reaction is extremely fast, 

 and that equilibrium is reached in five minutes, even at 

 a temperature of 0° C, and that no appreciable difference 

 is to be found in the absorption velocity, whether the re- 

 action takes place at 0° C. or 37° C. The present authors' 

 results, which are contradictory to those of Eisenberg and 

 Volk, may be summarised as follows : — (i) the establish- 

 ment of equilibrium in the absorption of agglutinins by 

 their specific bacteria is not attained, as stated by Eisen- 

 berg and Volk, in less than five minutes at 0° C, but 

 takes a considerable time, since equilibrium is not reached 

 at room temperature even in four hours ; (2) the adsorption 

 of agglutinin or trypsin by charcoal does not reach an 

 equilibrium within four hours at room temperature, nor 

 the adsorption of sulphuric acid by charcoal in twenty- 

 four hours, or possibly even in forty-eight hours ; (3) there 

 is no justification for judging as to the nature of the 

 interaction between an absorbing substance and a material 

 absorbed from the rapidity or slowness with which 

 equilibrium is attained, as has been done by ."Vrrhenius. — 

 Dr. G. Dreyer and J. Sholto C. Douglas: The absorp- 

 tion of agglutinin by bacteria, and the application of 

 physico-chemical laws thereto. Eisenberg and Volk, in 

 1902, were the first to make more or less exact quantitative 

 measurements of the absorption of agglutinins by bacteria. 

 They showed that if agglutinating serum were treated in 

 varying dilutions with a constant amount of homologous 

 bacteria, the amount of agglutinin taken away was not 

 constant, but that in a concentrated serum the absolute 

 amount removed was greater than in a diluted serum, 

 whilst, on the other hand, the relative amount taken away 

 in a dilute serum was much the greater. By taking the 

 experiments of Eisenberg and Volk, Arrhenius showed the 

 existence of a relation between the quantity of absorbed 

 agglutinin, C, and of the agglutinin left in the fluid, B, 

 and expressed this relationship in the simple formula 

 C =/!-B«. The result of the present experiments may be 

 summarised as follows: — (i) when an agglutinating serum 

 in different concentrations is treated with constant amounts 

 of bacteria, the quantity absorbed, C, may not only in- 

 crease to a limit value, but may, when this point is 

 passed, even decrease to zero when the concentration of 

 the serum is further increased, which is quite different to 



