49o 



NA TURE 



[October 7, 1922 



cutaneous sensibility and the rationale of his successful 

 treatment of the psychoneuroses were directly due to 

 his psychological training. So, too, his epoch-making 

 discoveries and his views in the field of anthropology 

 on the spread and conflict of cultures were largely due 

 to the application of that training. Shortly before his 

 death he was developing, as a committee member of 

 the Industrial Fatigue Research Board, an intense 

 interest in that youngest application of psychology, 

 namely, to the improvement of human conditions in 

 industrial and commercial work by the methods of ex- 

 perimental psychology applied to fatigue study, motion 

 study, and vocational selection. 



Unhappily, men of such wide sympathies and under- 

 standing as Rivers, combined with a devotion to scien- 

 tific work, are rare. He himself recognised that 

 " specialisation has ... in recent years reached such 

 a pitch that it has become a serious evil. There is 

 even a tendency," he rightly said, " to regard with 

 suspicion one who betrays the possession of know- 

 ledge or attainments outside a narrow circle of interests" 

 (Brit. Jour, of Psychol., vol. x., p. 184). Let his life, 

 his wisdom, his wide interests, sympathies and attain- 

 ments, and the generosity and honesty of his character, 

 be an example to us in the common object of our 

 meeting this week — the advancement of science. 



Obituary. 



Prof. F. D. Brown. 



WE regret to announce the death, on August 2, at 

 Remuera, New Zealand, of emeritus professor 

 Frederick Douglas Brown, at the age of seventy years. 

 Prof. Brown began the study of chemistry in 1870, 

 under Dr. Matthiessen, at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. 

 On the death of Dr. Matthiessen, he continued his 

 studies at the Royal College of Science, South Kensing- 

 ton and afterwards in Leipzig. On his return to 

 England about 1876, he began research work at the 

 London Institution with Prof. Armstrong, whom he 

 had known at St. Bartholomew's. He then spent 

 some time in Prof. Guthrie's laboratory and after- 

 wards in the University Laboratory, Oxford. During 

 this period, he was concerned in the teaching of 

 chemistry at Cheltenham and Clifton Colleges and 

 he also supervised the construction of the chemical 

 laboratories in University College, Nottingham. 



In 1883, Brown was appointed professor of chemistry 

 and physics in Auckland University College, a post 

 he held until 1914, when he came to England ; but 

 he was so upset by the conditions of the war, especially 

 the bombing, that he gave up his intention of settling 

 here and, in 1918, returned to the quiet of New Zealand. 

 He did the greatest possible service to the cause of 

 scientific education in New Zealand, where he was 

 generally held in high esteem. 



A man of original and independent, aristocratic mind 

 but entirely unobtrusive though charming manner, 

 firm and clear in his convictions and with a specially 

 developed sense of accuracy and thoroughness, Brown's 

 scientific work was of a classic character, though 

 through force of circumstances it could not be large 

 in amount : however, he not only made the best of 

 the material that was at his disposal in Auckland but 

 was also successful in inspiring those who studied 

 under him with his own high conceptions of scientific 

 duty. The work by which he is best known probablv 

 is that relating to fractional distillation, a subject on 

 which he was an authority in earlv days ; he also 

 paid much attention to the cvanide process of extracting 

 gold. 



Prof. F. T. Trouton, F.R.S. 



At Trinity College, Dublin, in the 'eighties of last 

 century, there assembled under Prof. FitzGerald a 

 small band of enthusiastic physicists of great ability 

 and originality, brought together by a common admira- 



NO. 2762, VOL. I io] 



tion and affection for their chief. Names which will 

 always be connected with this brilliant school of physics 

 are Joly, Preston, and Trouton. FitzGerald himself 

 did not live to be fifty, Preston died in his fortieth year, 

 and now, to the great grief of all those who ever knew 

 him, Trouton has left us at the age of fifty-eight, after 

 having been kept by illness for the past ten years from 

 the researches he loved. 



Trouton was born in Dublin in November 1863, the 

 son of a family well known in that city. As a student 

 at Trinity College he gave early evidence of that 

 versatility and quickness of grasp which characterised 

 his scientific career. He studied both engineering and 

 the physical sciences, and before graduating had already 

 on one hand taken a leading part in surveying for 

 a railway, and on the other enunciated that connexion 

 between latent heat and molecular weight which is 

 known as Trouton's Law. 1 He closed a brilliant under- 

 graduate career by taking degrees in engineering and 

 science at the same time, being awarded the coveted 

 Large Gold Medal, rarely bestowed for science. He 

 at once became assistant to the professor of physics 

 at Trinity College, and until FitzGerald's death in 

 1901 he remained the cherished colleague and intimate 

 friend of that great man. They carried out in collabora- 

 tion many experiments, including an important series 

 confirming, to a high degree of accuracy, Ohm's law 

 for electrolytes. Trouton never spoke of FitzGerald 

 without emotion characteristic of his generous nature. 



The Dublin school was immediately struck with the 

 importance of Hertz's experiments on electromagnetic 

 waves, which were published in 1887 and 1888, and 

 Trouton was one of the first to repeat them and to 

 carry out original work on the subject. He settled 

 the long-disputed question as to the relation between 

 the direction of the vibration in the wave-front of an 

 electromagnetic (light) wave and the plane of polarisa- 

 tion, 1)}' showing that the electric vector is normal to, 

 and the magnetic vector in, the plane of polarisation. 

 He demonstrated many analogies with optical experi- 

 ments by suitably increasing the size of the apparatus 

 to correspond to the great wave-length of the Hertzian 

 waves — thus a wall built of bricks of paraffin wax was 

 used to replace the soap film of ordinary light experi- 

 ments. Trouton's work did much to establish the 

 common electromagnetic nature of ordinary light and 

 of Hertzian waves. 



1 II M be the molecular weight, L the latent heat, T^the absolute tempera- 

 ture, then ML/T is constant. 



