434 Editorial Notes. 



" After three years of anxiety and stress," says Sir Charles Parsons, 

 the President, at the Bournemouth Meeting of the British Association, 

 the meetings for the intervening years having been cancelled, the 

 Association accepted the renewed invitation of friends and colleagues 

 to Bournemouth for September 9-12, 1919. The President (after 

 referring to the critical time of the meeting, when after the great 

 upheaval the elemental conditions of organization of the world are 

 still in flux) pointed out in what way the British Association could 

 best assist in the great work of reconstruction and progress now lying 

 before us. (1) By requisitioning and printing reports on the present 

 state of different branches of science ; (2) by granting sums of money 

 to small committees or individuals to enable them to carry on new 

 researches; (3) by recommending the Government to undertake 

 expeditions of discovery, or to make grants of money for certain 

 national purposes, which were beyond the means of the Association. 

 [As a matter of fact it has, since its commencement, paid out of its 

 own funds upwards of £80,000 in grants of this kind.] 



He proceeded to discourse on some of the developments in engineering 

 during the period prior to the War, in engines and turbines, in 

 Naval architecture, on tungsten steel, on gaseous explosions, on the 

 science of war, the advance in artillery and aircraft, on sound- 

 ranging and listening devices, and on electricity. The President 

 referred to the problems of the future, especially on the relative cost 

 of producing a given amount of electrical power from coal and from 

 water-power. It is estimated that the average capital required to 

 produce electrical power from coal is less than half the amount that 

 is required in the case of water-power; but the running costs in 

 connexion with water-power are much less than those in respect of 

 coal. The cost of harnessing all the water-power of the world would 

 be about 8,000 millions, or equal to the cost of the War to England. 



M. J* Jft Jfc Jfr 



Sir Charles devoted the penultimate section of his address to 

 borehole projects (which he had studied in 1904). He proposed to 

 sink a shaft 12 miles in depth — about ten times the depth of any 

 shaft in existence. The estimated cost was £5,000,000, and the 

 time required about eighty-five years, a period not often reached in 

 one lifetime! One question raised was: would the rocks at this 

 great depth crush in and destroy the shaft ? Professor Prank Adams, 

 of McGrill College, Montreal, published some results of his experiments 

 on crush-strains on rocks in the Journal of Geology, 1912, from which 

 he estimated that in limestone a depth of 15 miles would probably be 

 practicable, and in granite a depth of 30 miles might be reached. 

 Little is at present known of the earth's interior except by 

 inference from a study of its surface, upturned strata, shallow shafts, 

 the velocity of transmission of seismic disturbances, its rigidity and 

 specific gravity. Some attempt, he suggests, should be made to sink 

 a shaft as deep as may be found practicable at some locality selected 

 by geologists as the most likely to afford useful information. In 

 Italy, at Lardarello, boreholes have been sunk, which discharge 



