NoveMBER 1, 1918] 
is as we all know who have served on commit- 
tees, the opinion often of one man concurred in 
by others too indolent or tired or bored to look 
into the case thoroughly. How often the most 
efficient man on the committee is the astute 
but destructive critic who can see obstacles on 
every hand so clearly that he can not see the 
possibilities; who looking down an avenue of 
trees sees a wall of tree trunks and fails to 
realize that as you move forward there are 
wide open spaces between the trees. 
It appears to most people a strange fact that 
army boards so generally turn down new and 
valuable inventions. General Anson Mills, for 
example, recounts in his autobiography how 
his cartridge belt (now universally used in all 
armies, I understand) “ was submitted to every 
equipment board of the army organized be- 
tween 1866 and 1879, but so wedded were the 
authorities to the use of ancestral methods 
that no board ever made favorable mention of 
my invention.” This is a phenomenon trace- 
able to the environment of committee organi- 
zation and not to be explained on the ground 
of what is usually termed boneheadedness, and 
it is this environment factor which surrounds 
the proposed institution for invention that ap- 
pears not to be appreciated by the originators 
of the scheme. 
An institute devoted to a special field of 
knowledge which hires men to do research 
along those lines and gives them facilities and 
supports them is very different from one which 
covers practically the whole field of human 
knowledge and proposes to sit in judgment 
upon the ideas of the poor inventors. 
Davin Famcuitp 
CIRCULAR FREQUENCY 
Ir would frequently be convenient if there 
were in common use a name for the letter n 
which occurs in the equation 
y=a cos nt 
for simple harmonic motion. Mr. Jeans, in 
his “ Theoretical Mechanics,” p. 263, calls this 
n the frequency of the motion. This is un- 
fortunate, because the term “frequency” is 
usually applied to the quantity n/2z. Pro- 
fessor Lamb, in his “ Dynamical Theory of 
SCIENCE 
447 
Sound,” p. 10, suggests the term rapidity. I 
recall a few years ago seeing some place the 
term Kreisfrequenz, which suggested that we 
should perhaps have a satisfactory name for 
this n if we were to call it the circular fre- 
quency of the motion. This term is longer 
than rapidity, but it has an advantage in that 
it naturally calls to mind that the n not only 
is proportional to the frequency of the motion 
but also represents the angular velocity of an 
imaginary particle in the reference circle. 
ArtHurR Taser JONES 
SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 
The Conservation of Food Energy. By Henry 
Prentiss Armsby. Philadelphia, W. B. 
Saunders Co. 1918. 
This little book of sixty-five pages contains 
a vast amount of information concerning the 
relative values of different feeding substances 
when they are given to farm animals. The 
method of estimating these values is new. 
Armsby states “Aside from the milk require- 
ments of the very young animal, it has been 
demonstrated to be entirely feasible to pro- 
duce good yields of milk or well fattened car- 
casses, not only of cattle and sheep but of 
swine as well, on a ration containing ample 
roughage to meet the requirements for main- 
tenance, leaving the concentrates to be applied 
directly to the production of human food.” 
This is a new view point, for T. B. Wood in 
England? believes that meal made from grain 
is the chief kind of fodder consumed by pigs. 
Armsby assumes that the maintenance diet of 
farm animals is at the expense of coarse 
fodder, grass, hay, straw, ete., and that the 
development of food value in the animals may 
be ascribed to the grain ingested. The grains 
considered are wheat, corn, barley, rye, oats, 
rice and buckwheat. When these grains are 
fed under the above conditions, between 15 
and 24 per cent. of their energy may be con- 
verted into human food in the bodies of cattle 
and sheep, and between 36 to 61 per cent. 
when they are fed to pigs and dairy cows. 
1‘‘The National Food Supply in Peace and 
War,’’ Cambridge University Press, 1917. 
