Septembeb 25, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



409 



QUOTATIONS 

 THE NEW BRITISH PATENTS ACT 



This act, the Patents and Designs Act, be- 

 came operative on August 28. Its principal 

 clause runs as follows: "At any time, not 

 less than one year after the passing of this act, 

 any person may apply to the Comptroller for 

 the revocation of the patent, on the ground 

 that the patented article or process is manu- 

 factured or carried on exclusively or mainly 

 outside of the United Kingdom." In future, 

 foreign manufacturers, if they wish their 

 patents to remain valid in Great Britain, will 

 have to make the goods they sell within the 

 United Kingdom. Otherwise their patents 

 may be copied or infringed at will. Germany 

 and the United States are particularly hit by 

 the new enactment, and they are meeting the 

 altered conditions by (1) building factories 

 of their own in England ; (2) acquiring prem- 

 ises already built for the purpose of carrying 

 on their business; (3) arranging with British 

 manufacturers to lay down plant and cooper- 

 ate in the production of the special articles 

 which are the subject of the patent. Already 

 some thirty foreign firms — many of them con- 

 ducting operations on a large scale — have 

 begun, or are about to begin operations in 

 this country, most of them choosing the north 

 of England as the scene of their operations. 

 It is said that as a rule the foreign manu- 

 facturer is providing a factory many times 

 larger than is really necessary for the con- 

 struction of his patented article, his explana- 

 tion being that he can not run works in 

 England on patents alone, and he intends 

 therefore to manufacture in this country 

 goods that have hitherto been imported ready- 

 made. So far as can be seen at present the 

 act must profit British labor. It is said in 

 some quarters that these manufactures, at 

 any rate the German ones, will be worked by 

 foreign staffs, but this is not the case at pres- 

 ent with Messrs. Meister, Lucius and Briin- 

 ning (Limited), of Germany, a company with 

 a capital of £11,000,000, which has just 

 erected a new chemical factory at EUesmere 

 Port. Here all the workers employed are 



English, with the exception of a few German 

 overseers. The working of the act will be 

 watched with keen and anxious attention, for 

 British manufacturers are beginning to real- 

 ize that foreign competition is about to invade 

 their own particular territory, and that there 

 will be a fair but strenuous fight on British 

 soil for British custom. That is not a pros- 

 pect that can be viewed altogether without 

 anxiety when the perfection of German or- 

 ganization is remembered. The German things 

 to be manufactured in England will be mostly 

 aniline dyes, pottery, plants for gas making, 

 rifles, plated goods, electrical contrivances, 

 furnaces, sanitary appliances; the American, 

 typewriters, safety razors, phonograph rec- 

 ords, shoes, telephones and wire roofing. — 

 Journal of the Society of Arts. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 The Physiology of the Stomata. By Francis 

 Ernest Lloyd. Pp. 1-142; f. 40, pi. 14. 

 Carnegie Institution of Washington, Pub- 

 lication, No. 82. 



The purpose of this study has been twofold : 

 first, to determine to what extent the stomata 

 are able to regulate transpiration; secondly, 

 to ascertain the physiological cause of stom- 

 atal movement. The investigation was car- 

 ried on almost exclusively with two desert 

 plants, Fouguieria splendens and Verhena 

 ciliata. Both of these plants were found to 

 have leaves of the usual tropophytic char- 

 acter and without any of the obvious adap- 

 tive characters related to desert conditions. 

 The rate of transpiration was determined by 

 reading the volume of water absorbed from 

 burettes to which cuttings of the plants were 

 attached. By weighing any error due to the 

 absorption of water by the tissues of the shoot 

 or its loss by wilting was corrected. To de- 

 termine the area of the stomatal openings at 

 various times of day and so to correlate the 

 movements of the guard-cells with the fluc- 

 tuations of transpiration, portions of the epi- 

 dermis were removed and fixed in absolute 

 alcohol. It was found that this treatment had 

 no appreciable effect upon the guard-cells and 



