196 
NATURE 
[APRIL 25, 1912 
bottles is to gain knowledge relating to ocean cur- 
rents. It is difficult, however, and generally impos- 
sible, to obtain trustworthy information in this con- 
nection from the drift of bottles, because when a 
bottle is sufficiently weighted to present little surface 
to the wind, it sinks when covered with barnacles, 
and if not so weighted is influenced by winds as much 
as or more than by currents. Moreover, it is the 
resultant drift during a period of unknown length, not 
the direction and velocity of the various currents a 
bottle encounters, that can be estimated. Bottle 
messages might, however, be utilised with advantage 
to shipping were the drifts charted of even half those 
that have been recovered—their name is legion. Such 
charts would be useful for tracing the probable tracks 
of disabled steamers and thus locating them. 
Mr. R. N. Lyne, director of agriculture in 
Portuguese East Africa, has been appointed the 
director of the mew agricultural department of 
Ceylon. 
Tue following have been nominated president and 
vice-presidents of the Institution of Electrical 
Engineers :—President, Mr. W. Duddell, F.R.S.; 
vice-presidents, Mr. W. Judd, Mr. C. H. Merz, Major 
W. A. J. O’Meara, C.M.G., and Mr. J. F. C. Snell. 
An official announcement from Mr. C. E. Adams, 
Government astronomer for New Zealand, states that 
the adopted position of the transit instrument at the 
Hector Observatory, Wellington, is latitude 41° 17/ 
3°76" south, longitude 11h. 39m. 427s. east of Green- 
wich; height above 1909 mean sea-level, 418 ft. 
Mr. Gustav Portax, who is preparing a biography 
of Michael Heilprin and his sons, will be glad to 
receive any letters by the late Prof. Angelo Heilprin. 
They may be sent to Mr. Pollak at No. 21 West 
Eighty-fifth Street, New York, and will be returned 
to the senders promptly if required. 
ReuTer’s AGENcy has received the first letters 
which have reached this country from Dr. Mawson’s 
Australian Antarctic Expedition. It is stated that, 
although in the earliest stages of its worl, the ex- 
pedition has disproved the existence of Clairie Land, 
confirmed the existence of Termination Land, dis- 
covered by Wilkes, but not seen either by the 
Challenger or the Gauss, discovered numerous islets 
along the Great Barrier, and charted a great deal of 
previously unknown coast-line. 
Tue death is reported, at the age of fifty-one, of 
Dr. Perry L. Hobbs, professor of chemistry at the 
Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio. He 
was one of the first men in America to specialise as 
a chemical engineer, and was widely known through 
his experiments in the manufacture of concrete. : 
Mr. E. C. Hawkins, the chief engineer of the 
Morgan-Guggenheim properties in Alaska, has died 
in the New York Hospital after an operation. In 
his construction of the White Pass and Yukon and 
the Copper River and Northern railways he met and 
overcame several problems of engineering that were 
new to the profession. In building the Childs Glacier 
NO. 2217, VOL. 89| 
; any success 
bridge across the Copper River, for example, he had 
to evade the Miles glacier on one hand and the 
Childs glacier on the other. Mr. Williams was born 
in 1860, and was educated at the Rensselaer Insti- 
tute, Troy, New York State. 
On Tuesday next, April 30, Mr. F. Balfour Browne 
will begin a course of two lectures at the Royal 
Institution on ‘Insect Distribution, with Special 
Reference to the British Islands,” and on Thursday, 
May 2, Prof. J. Norman Collie will give the first of 
two lectures on ‘Recent Explorations in the 
Canadian Rocky Mountains.” The Friday evening 
discourse on May 3 will be delivered by Mr. W. C. 
Dampier Whetham on “The Use of Pedigrees,”’ and 
on May to by Prof. W..Sfirling on ‘‘The Gaumont 
Speaking Kinematograph Films”’ (illustrated by the 
aid of M. Gaumont). 
Tue Home Secretary has appointed a committee 
to inquire and report whether the following diseases 
can properly be added to those enumerated in the 
third schedule of the Workmen’s Compensation Act, 
1906, namely—(1) cowpox; (2) Dupuytren’s contrac- 
tion; (3) clonic spasm of the eyelids, apart from 
nystagmus. The following are the members of the 
committee :—Mr. Ellis J. Griffith, K.C., M.P., Sir T. 
Clifford Allbutt, K.C.B., F.R.S., his Honour Judge 
A. Ruegg, K.C., and Dr. T. M. Legge. The secretary 
of the committee is Mr. Alexander Maxwell, of the 
Home Office, to whom all correspondence on the sub- 
ject of the inquiry should be addressed. 
In The Times of April 22 appears a description by 
a correspondent of the archaeological work of the 
Egyptian Research Account, directed by Prof. Petrie, 
during the past season. From this it appears that 
Prof. Petrie and his coadjutors have made very 
interesting discoveries of antiquities of the time of 
King Narmer, of the First Dynasty, which show that 
the crocodile worship in the Fayyfim was already 
established in his time. These finds were made in 
a necropolis at Kafr Ammar, in Middle Egypt. 
“Surprising discoveries’? were made also at Helio- 
polis, where excavation has not hitherto met with 
whatever. These are to be described 
later. At Memphis an alabaster sphinx weighing 
80 tons has been found. 
Tue Manchester Oriental Society was _ recently 
started by that well-known scholar Prof. Hope W. 
Hogg, whose premature death was a serious loss to 
science and a subject of general regret. The first 
part of the Proceedings of the society, prepared under 
his supervision, has just appeared. The most 
interesting contribution takes the shape of a 
symposium of well-known scholars with the object 
of solving a problem suggested by Prof. Elliot Smith. 
In examining Egyptian mummies, he noticed that it 
was a general habit to leave the heart in situ, while 
this was not apparently the case with other internal 
organs. The psychological explanation of this 
differentiation of treatment is still uncertain, though 
it is suggested by Prof. Rhys Davids, on evidence 
from India, that the heart was regarded as the seat 
of the soul. Prof. J. G. Frazer remarks that among 
