142 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1915, 
Committee is responsible. The marked progress that has been made 
in the study of rotatory dispersion may be shown by the list of papers 
which have been published during the year. These include a paper on 
‘ Optical Rotatory Dispersion, Part I. The Natural and Mag- 
netic Rotatory Dispersion in Quartz of Light in the Visible 
Region of the Spectrum’ (‘ Phil. Trans.,” 1912, A. 212, 
261-97), 
which will be followed shortly by Part IJ., in which the extension 
of the polarimetric method through the ultra-violet and infra-red regions 
of the spectrum will be described. 
The application of these new physical methods to the study of 
chemical problems is described in a second series of papers, of which 
the following have been published already, or are in preparation for 
publication in the autumn: 
‘The Rotatory Dispersive Power of Organic Compounds.’ 
I. The Measurement of Rotatory Dispersion (‘ Trans. Chem. Soc.,’ 
1913, 103, 1062-1067). 
II. The Form of the Rotatory Dispersion Curves (‘ Trans. Chem. 
Soc.,’ 1913, 103, 1067-1075). 
III. ‘The Measurement of Magnetic Rotatory Dispersion (f Trans. 
Chem. Soc.,’ 1913, 108, 1322-1331). 
IV. Magnetic Rotation and Dispersion in some simple Organic Liquids 
(‘ Proc. Chem. Soc.,’ June 19, 1918). 
Vv. A Comparison of the Optical and Magnetic Rotatory Dispersion 
in some simple Organic Liquids. 
VI Anomalous Rotatory Dispersion (‘ Proc. Chem. Soc.,’ June 5, 
1913). 
Attention may also be directed to a paper by Armstrong and Walker 
on ‘ The Causes of Variation in the Optical Rotatory Power of Organic 
Compounds and of Anomalous Rotatory Dispersive Power ’ (‘ Proc. Roy. 
Soc.,’ 1913, A. 88, 388-403), in which the close relationship between 
rotatory dispersion and dynamic isomerism is specially emphasised. 
The general result of these investigations has been to show that a 
knowledge.of the phenomena of dynamic isomerism is essential for the 
interpretation of optical rotation, especially in the case of liquids which 
show anomalous rotatory dispersion; conversely, it is believed that the 
study of rotatory dispersion will open up a new and fruitful field for 
the investigation of dynamic isomerism in the case of large groups of 
important compounds. 
B. Successive Isomeric Changes. 
The past year has also seen the completion of a long series of 
experiments on the complex isomeric changes which take place in the 
amide and piperidide of camphor-carboxylic acid. Nearly five years 
ago it was discovered that these substances were capable of giving 
inflected mutarotation curves. An investigation of ‘ The Equations for 
Two Consecutive Unimolecular Changes’ (Lowry and John, ‘ Trans. 
Chem. Soc.,’ 1910, 97, 2634-2645) showed that inflected curves might 
be produced by two successive isomeric changes, but the experimental 
