December 2, 1922] 



NA TURE 



747 



vol. 17, p. 49) of a report of a lecture by Graham Bell, 

 stating that on one occasion the lecturer had been able 

 to converse over a distance of about 250 miles. Our 

 reference, however, in the obituary notice of Graham 

 Bell, was to commercial telephony. In the Journal 

 of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, April 1922, 

 p. 429, Mr. Kingsbury gives the following quotation 

 from the first business circular issued by Graham Bell 

 and his associates. They state that they were " pre- 

 pared to furnish telephones for the transmission of 

 articulate speech through instruments not more than 

 20 miles apart." 



Prof. H. E. Armstrong asks us to say that in his 

 letter published in Nature of November 25, p. 700, 

 he wrote Babelonian, which was altered without his 

 approval to Babylonian — thus obliterating his point. 



Among the books to be published by the Cambridge 

 University Press during December is " Prolegomena 

 to Analytical Geometry in Anisotropic Euclidean Space 

 of three Dimensions," by E. H. Neville, the first half 

 of which will be an account of the principles under- 

 lying the use of Cartesian axes and vector frames in 

 ordinary space. The second half will describe ideal 

 complex Euclidean space of three dimensions and 

 develop a system of definitions in consequence of 

 which the geometry of this space has the same 

 vocabulary as elementary geometry, and enunciations 

 and proofs of propositions in elementary geometry 

 remain so far as possible significant and valid. 

 The same publishers also promise for this month 

 " A Summer in Greenland," by Prof. A. C. Seward. 

 It will contain some 30 maps and illustrations. 



Our Astronomical Column. 



Possible Recurrence of a Meteor Shower. — 

 On the morning of December 5, 1921, there was 

 observed a very rich shower of meteors from Leo 

 Minor at 156 +37°. The event was witnessed at 

 the Astronomical Observatory at Tokyo by the 

 observers there, who recorded 44 meteors in 55 

 minutes, radiating from the special shower alluded 

 to. The position in the N. part of Leo Minor from 

 which the meteors were directed has been known 

 for many years as the centre of a rich shower of 

 swift, streaking meteors in October, November, and 

 the first half of December. It was well observed at 

 Bristol in 1876, November 20-28, from the point 

 155° +36 (21 meteors), and is especially described as 

 a possibly new and very active shower in Nature 

 for December 21, 1876, p. 158. Should this meteoric 

 displav recur in the present year it may be looked 

 for in England at about midnight and the two hours 

 immediately following, on December 4. The moon 

 will, however, be nearly full and will moderate the 

 character of the display. It will certainly be 

 important to observe it if possible, and it is hoped 

 that the sky will be attentively watched on the date 

 in question. 



Calendar Reform. — Mr. Charles F. Marion, of the 

 U.S. Weather Bureau, has published a leaflet strongly 

 urging the adoption of a 13-month calendar, each 

 month to consist of 4 weeks exactly. One day in the 

 year, preferably the last, would be outside week and 

 month. In leap-year there would be another such 

 day, which might conveniently precede the first day 

 of the seventh month. The names " Sol " or " Mid- 

 year " are suggested for the seventh month, the other 

 months having their names unchanged. It is pointed 

 out that meteorology would be greatly simplified by 

 such a system, since records at present are complicated 

 by the unequal months. Further, since each par- 

 ticular week would then always occupy the same place 

 in the solar year, monthly records could be supple- 

 mented bv weekly ones. 



The chief objection brought against the 13-month 

 year is that it does not divide into quarters. But it is 

 to be noted that the existing quarter-days are not at 

 the ends of months. To place them after the first 

 week of the fourth month, the second of the seventh 

 month, etc., would be very little more complicated 

 than the present system. Monthly payments would 

 be made 13 times per annum instead of 12, and the 

 anomaly of paying the same for 28 days as for 31 

 would be removed. 



Astronomers would welcome the equalisation of the 

 months and the removal of leap-day from its present 

 awkward position. The year 1928 begins with a 



NO. 27/O, VOL. I IO] 



Sunday, so the change might then be made with a 

 minimum of dislocation. 



A bill has been introduced into the United States 

 Congress authorising and requesting the President to 

 call an international conference on the subject in 

 1923. It is suggested that the dates of religious 

 festivals are best left to the religious bodies to deter- 

 mine : it introduces needless difficulties to superpose 

 these questions upon changes in the civil calendar. 



The Brightness and Rotation of Uranus. — 

 Astr. Nachr. No. 5184 contains a paper on this subject 

 by C. Wirtz. He has made a very careful series of 

 magnitude determinations with a Zeiss field-glass from 

 July 1921 to January 1922. The mean magnitude, 

 reduced to mean opposition, is 5-64. The magnitudes 

 of the six comparison stars were taken from Harvard ; 

 small corrections, leaving the mean magnitude un- 

 changed, were deduced from his own observations. The 

 author is evidently a skilled observer and the probable 

 error of each night comes out as 0-04™, that of the 

 mean being less than o-oi" 1 . He has grouped them in 

 accordance with the rotation period of iof hours 

 given by the spectroscope, and finds a sine-curve with 

 an amplitude of 0-02'", which he regards as too small 

 to receive with confidence ; in 1917, L. Campbell 

 found a curve with an amplitude of 0-15™, but if the 

 physical state of Uranus is like that of Jupiter, changing 

 spots might well alter the amplitude. 



Wirtz suggests that it is worth while to keep up 

 the investigation of the magnitude of Uranus from 

 year to year, as it may throw light on the oblateness 

 of the disc. He estimates that when the pole is near 

 the centre, the magnitude should be about o-i m 

 brighter than when it is on the edge ; this is an 

 amount within the reach of delicate photometry. He 

 thinks, however, that the apsidal motion of the inner 

 satellite Ariel should give a more trustworthy value. 



Misconceptions about Relativity. — Since the 

 verification of the Einstein bending of light by 

 gravitation in 1919, many speculations on the subject 

 have appeared in astronomical publications. A letter 

 in the Journal of the R.A.S. of Canada (September- 

 October 1922) suggests that the Gegenschein is the 

 result of the bending of sunlight by the earth's 

 attraction so as to come to a focus. The amount 

 of bending of a grazing ray is proportional to 

 mass/radius, so that the bending at the earth's 

 surface is i"75/30oo or 1/1900 of a second of arc. 

 It is manifest that such an infinitesimal bending could 

 produce no discernible optical effects, and it seems 

 inadvisable to print such suggestions without com- 

 ment, since their appearance in such a weighty journal 

 is calculated to mislead. 



