NATURE 



[July 4, 1907 



Lord Rayleigh, F.R.S., Sir J. Dewar, T.R.S., Sir A. 

 Noble, Bart., F.R.S., Sir W. Crookps, F.R.S., Dr. J. A. 

 Ewing, F.R.S., Dr. A. Dupre, F.R.S. — absent through 

 illness; Major-General D. D. T. O'C'altaghan, president, 

 Ordnance Committee ; Rear-Admiral R. F. O. Foote, vice- 

 president. Ordnance Committee ; Lieut. -Colonel Sir F. L. 

 Nathan, superintendent, Royal Gunpowder Factory ; 

 Captain B. H. Chevallier, assistant to Director Naval 

 Ordnance; Captain J. H. Thomson and Major k. McN. C. 

 Cooper Key, H.M. Inspectors of Explosives, Home Office; 

 and Mr. R. Robertson, superintendent in Chemist Research 

 Department. 



The New Zealand Government is about to undertake 

 extensive trawling of an experimental nature. Mr. L. F. 

 Ayson, Chief Inspector of Fisheries, will be in charge, 

 and Mr. Edgar R. Waite, curator of the Canterbury 

 Museum, Christchurch, has been appointed zoologist to 

 the expedition. Collections will be made of all marine 

 products, which will be investigated, so far as possible, by 

 New Zealand naturalists, and the material obtained will 

 be the property of the Canterbury Museum. The com- 

 mittee for biological and hydrographical study of the New 

 Zealand coast, appointed by the .Australasian Association 

 for Advancement of Science, will provide certain equip- 

 ment for use in the deeper waters. The }^ora Nevin, a 

 new steam trawler just from the stocks at Grimsby, 

 England, built to the order of the Napier (N.Z.) Fish 

 Supply Co., has been chartered by the New Zealand 

 Government, and it is anticipated that operations will 

 extend over a period of three months. 



The annua! general meeting of the Society of Arts, the 

 153rd since the foundation of the society, was held on 

 June 26, Sir Steuart Colvin Bayley, K.C.S.I., CLE., 

 chairman of the council, being in the chair. The Prince 

 of Wales was re-elected president of the society, an ofifice 

 which he has filled since iqoi. It was announced that a 

 committee has been appointed to make further investigation 

 into the subject of the deterioration of paper, on which 

 subject a committee reported in 1898. The council of 

 the society is prepared to award, under the Fother- 

 gill trust, a gold medal, or a prize of 20Z., for the best 

 portable apparatus or appliance for enabling men to under- 

 take rescue work in mines or other places where the air 

 is noxious. Inventors intending to compete should send 

 in a notice of their intention, together with a full descrip- 

 tion of their inventions, not later than March 31, 1908, 

 to the secretary of the Society of Arts, John Street, Adelphi, 

 London, W.C. 



We regret to see the announcement of the death, on 

 June 28, at the age of eighty-two, of Sir William T. 

 Gairdner, K.C.B., F.R.S. , formerly professor of medicine 

 in the University of Glasgow. Sir William Gairdner 

 graduated as M.D. at the University of Edinburgh in 

 1845. He made numerous contributions to the science of 

 medicine, more especially in the departments of pathology, 

 public health and hygiene, and clinical medicine. He was 

 recognised as one of the foremost physicians of his time, 

 and his status in the medical profession is indicated bv the 

 fact that he was president of the British Medical Associ- 

 ation in 1888. For several years he acted as the first 

 medical ofTicer of health for the City of Glasgow, and the 

 measures he then initiated for securing the health of the 

 community soon materially lowered the death-rate of the 

 city, and have been adopted largely at home and abroad. 

 Sir William Gairdner was appointed K.C.B. in i8Sq, and 

 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1893. Among 

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other distinctions, he received the degree of LL.D. Edin. 

 in 1883, and that of M.D. Dublin (honoris causa), with 

 the honorary Fellowship of the Royal College of Physicians 

 of Ireland, in 1887. His principal works were " Clinical 

 Medicine," 1S62 ; "Public Health in Relation to Air and 

 Water," 1862; "On some Modern Aspects of Insanitv." 

 " Lectures to Practitioners " (jointly with Dr. J. Coats). 

 1888; "The Physician as a Naturalist," 1888; and many 

 papers in medical journals and in the transactions of 

 pathological and medical societies. 



The death of Dr. Carl Braun, .S.J., which we regret to 

 have to announce, recalls the earnest efforts that Hungary 

 has made of late years to assume a more prominent posi- 

 tion in astronomical science. The late Archbishop of 

 Kalocsa, who provided and equipped the observatory of 

 that town, placed it under the charge of Dr. Braun, and 

 here he worked indcfatigably in those preliminary matters 

 which are so necessary in a young institution. He 

 mounted the instruments, determined the position of the 

 observatory, and decided the course of future observation, 

 which under Father Fenyi has been productive of such 

 fruitful results. .As a pupil of Secchi, he naturally turned 

 to spectroscopic observation of the sun, and in this depart- 

 ment the work of the observatory is well known. .Such 

 questions as the density of the earth also occupied him, 

 and in the later years of his life he contributed papers on 

 cosmogony. Indeed, his activity ranged over many sub- 

 jects, and though he suffered much in the I-'i'-r venrs of 

 his life, his colleagues speak of his untiring industry and 

 continued perseverance. Dr. Braun was possessed of 

 great mechanical ingenuity. This was manifested in the 

 construction of, or rather suggestion for, a form of transit 

 micrometer that reduced personal equation to a minimum, 

 and of a plan for photographing the sun by monochromatic 

 light, forestalling by many years the work of Hale and 

 Deslandres. 



The annual meeting of the general committee of the 

 Imperial Cancer Research Fund was held on Monday at 

 Marlborough House, the Prince of Wales presiding. In 

 moving the adoption of the report. Sir William Church 

 said : — Our knowledge of the existence and frequency ol 

 cancer in various races of men is steadily increasing, am 

 evidence is accumulating that its presence is not infre^ 

 quently associated with native customs or religious rites 

 which act as sources of chronic irritation of portions of 

 the surface of the body and appear to determine the 

 character and position of the cancerous growths most 

 commonly met with. The information we have received 

 lends no support to the view that cancer is associated 

 with any particular kind of diet ; populations living on a 

 purely vegetable diet are apparently as subject to it as 

 those whose food is of a mixed character. Resort to ex- 

 periment must be had in order to trace more accurately 

 the circumstances associated with the spontaneous occur- 

 rence of cancer both in individuals and in families. The 

 removal by surgical means of cancerous tumours occur- 

 ring spontaneously in mice prolongs their lives and has 

 enabled us to breed from them ; we have, therefore, now 

 the means of observing descendants of mice of known 

 cancerous parent.ige, and by successively crossing other 

 spontaneously affected animals with the offspring of 

 cancerous parents, we can concentrate the hereditary 

 tendency, if it exists. This concentration in large numbers 

 of animals of a known age and in a known amount should 

 enable us, in the course of a few years, to determine 

 w'hether there is a family or only an individual tendency 

 to the disease. Other experimental investigations have 



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