756 



NA TURE 



[December 2, 1922 



Calendar of Industrial Pioneers. 



December 3, 1863. John Watkins Brett died. — A 

 pioneer of submarine telegraphy, Brett obtained 

 permission in 1847 from Louis Philippe to establish 

 connexion by cable between England and France, a 

 project which was first carried out in 1850. 



December 4, 1804. Philippe Le Bon died. — In 

 Fiance, Le Bon is regarded as the inventor of lighting 

 by gas. Educated for the Government service, in 

 1794 he became a professor in the Ecole des Ponts 

 et Chaussees. Three years later he was able to light 

 his house at Bruchay by the distillation of wood, and 

 in 1799 he was granted a patent. On December 4, 

 1804, he was found in the Champs-Elysees murdered 

 by an unknown hand. 



December 6, 1777. Johann Andreas Cramer died.- 

 Regarded as the greatest assayer of his time, Cramer 

 was born in Quedlinburg in 1710, taught assaying in 

 Leyden and London, and afterwards was councillor 

 of mines and metallurgy at Blankenburg. His 

 " Docimasia " was published in 1736 and his 

 " Elementa Artis Docimasticae " in 1739. 



December 6, 1892. Werner von Siemens died.- 

 I In eldest of the famous Siemens brothers, Werner 

 Siemens was born at Lenthe, Hanover, on December 

 13, 1816, and in 1838 became an artillery officer. 

 Distinguished for his scientific attainments, with 

 fohn (icorg Halske- (1814-1890) he founded in 1S47 

 the in m of Siemens and Halske at Berlin, and the 

 following year with Himly laid the first telegraph 

 line in Germany. He made many discoveries in 

 electricity, in 1866 gave half a million marks for the 

 founding of an Imperial Institute of Technology and 

 Physics, and in 1888 was ennobled. 



December 7, 1880. Henry R. Worthington died.-- 

 The original inventor of the direct-acting steam 

 pump, of which many thousands of various types are 

 manufactured annually, Worthington took out his 

 first patent in 1841, and in 1845 founded the Worthing- 

 ton Hydraulic Works of New York, which became the 

 leading establishment for the construction of steam- 

 pumping machinery in the United States. 



December 7, 1894. Ferdinand Viscomte de Lesseps 

 died. — The originator and constructor of the Suez 

 Canal, one of the great engineering works of last 

 century, de Lesseps was born at Versailles in 1805, 

 and at the age of twenty joined the French diplomatic 

 service. Among other places he served at Cairo 

 and Alexandria. Obtaining a concession from Said 

 Pasha in 1854, he started the canal in 1858 ; a vessel 

 of 80 tons passed from the Mediterranean to the Red 

 Sea in 1867, and on November 17, 1869, the canal 

 was formally opened. A colossal statue of de 

 Lesseps stands at Port Said. De Lesseps also 

 launched the scheme for the Panama Canal, and 

 when an old man of eighty -eight was with the 

 other directors found guilty of mismanagement and 

 sentenced to a term of imprisonment, which, however, 

 was not enforced. 



December 8, 1870. Thomas Brassey died. — At a 

 period when railways were first coming into extensive 

 use, Brassey with various partners carried out some 

 hundreds of important contracts including railways 

 in England, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, 

 Argentine, and India 



December 9, 1814. Joseph Bramah died.— Known 

 for Ins invention of a safety lock, a beer engine, tin 

 hydraulic press, and a machine for numbering and 

 dating banknotes, Bramah was a native of York- 

 shire, but lor many years was one of the leading 

 mechanicians in London. E. C. S. 



NO. 277O. VOL. I IO] 



Societies and Academies. 



London. 

 Linnean Society, November 2. — Dr. A. Smith 

 Woodward, president, in the chair. — A. B. Rendle : 

 Early specimens of the dahlia and chrysanthemum 

 from the Banksian Herbarium. — J. S. Huxley : The 

 courtship of birds. — B. Daydon Jackson: The use 

 oi the name Forstera or Forsteria. Both names were 

 used by Linne on a sheet in his herbarium with his 

 note Fostera vaginalis on a sheet which formerly 

 had a grass-like plant glued upon it and therefore 

 was widely separated from the Stylidiaceous genus 

 which at the present day bears the name Forstera. 



Aristotelian Society, November 6. — Prof. A. N. 

 Whitehead, president, in the chair. — A. N. Whitehead : 

 Uniformity and contingency (presidential address). 

 Our awareness of Nature consists of the projection of 

 sense-objects into a spatio-temporal continuum either 

 within or without our bodies. But " projection " 

 implies a sensorium which is the origin of projection. 

 This sensorium is within our bodies, and each sense- 

 object can be described as located in any region of 

 space-time only by reference to a particular simul- 

 taneous location of a bodily sensorium. The process 

 of projection consists in our awareness of an irreducible 

 many-termed relation between the sense-object in 

 question, the bodily sensorium, and the space-time 

 continuum, and it also requires our awareness of 

 that continuum as stratified into layers of simul- 

 taneity, the temporal thickness of which depends on 

 the specious present. If this account of Nature be 

 accepted, then space-time must be uniform, for any 

 part of it settles the scheme of relations for the whole 

 irrespective of the particular mode in which any 

 other part of it, in the future or the past or elsewhere 

 in space, may exhibit the ingression of sense-objects. 

 Accordingly, the scheme of relations must be ex- 

 hibited with a systematic uniformity. We have here 

 the primary ground of uniformity in Nature. 



Mineralogical Society, November 7 (anniversary 

 meeting). — Dr. A. Hutchinson, president, in the 

 chair. — W. A. Richardson : The frequency-distribu- 

 tion of igneous rocks in relation to petrogenic theories. 

 The distribution of igneous rocks shows a separation 

 into two primary types, probably corresponding to 

 two primary earth shells, which have originated 

 under early planetary conditions. All other rocks 

 are normally distributed about the two primaries, 

 and the probable cause of such a distribution is 

 fractional crystallisation. The frequency-distribu- 

 tion likelv to result from different petrogenic processes 

 is examined and discussed. — Miss I. E. Knaggs : 

 The connexion between crystal structure and chemical 

 constitution of carbon compounds. In certain simple 

 substitution products of methane, the crystal sym- 

 metry may be predicted from the known configura- 

 tion of the chemical molecule. The symmetry of a 

 molecule of the type CX 4 is that of a regular tetra- 

 hedron, X being either a univalent atom or a group 

 ol atoms, which does not destroy the trigonal 

 symmetry about the bonds from the central carbon 

 atom. Compounds of this type crystallise in the 

 cubic system. Compounds in which X is a more 

 complex group, but sufficiently symmetrical to main- 

 tain tetragonal symmetry, crystallise in the tetra- 

 gonal system, most frequently in the holohedral 

 class, in which case the crystal is considered to be 

 built up of cells each containing eight molecules. 

 Molecules of the type CX 3 Y have one axis of trigonal 

 symmetry, and this symmetry is preserved in the 

 crystal, except when X is hydrogen. The ortho- 

 rhombic symmetry of molecules of the type CX 2 Y 2 



