ol2 
per ton of displacement; in the cross-Chan- 
nel boat he proposed 30 knots. The im- 
provement in the time of transit through 
the Suez Canal, due both to the widening 
and deepening of the original canal and to 
the use of the electric light for night pas- 
sages, were the striking facts of Sir Charles 
Hartley’s valuable description of the engi- 
neering features of the canal. 
In the Anthropological Section, Mr. C. 
H. Read’s address developed the idea first 
proposed by him at the Liverpool meeting 
of an Imperial bureau of ethnology. The 
scheme has been accepted in principle by 
the Governmené, and the administrators of 
nitive races have now the highest official 
encouragement to furnish reports and ob- 
servations to the central institution. The 
bureau will stand in relation to the Eth- 
nographical Department of the British 
Museum, but the Museum cannot maintain 
the bureau from its own resources; still 
less can it provide the teaching organiza- 
tion which Mr. Read regards as an essential 
part of this scheme. The solution which 
he proposes is to establish the bureau in a 
part of the Imperial Institute; to transfer 
the Ethnographical Department thither into 
the close neighborhood of the Indian and 
Art Museums; and to look to the Univer- 
sity of London, established under the same 
roof, for a professor and a school of an- 
thropology. Dr. Haddon and his colleagues 
described the Cambridge expedition to 
Torres Straits, of which we hope to give 
later some account. The papers of Dr. 
Garson, Mr. Maciver, and Professor Mac- 
alister illustrated in different ways the 
growing demand for real accuracy in an- 
thropometry, the growing scepticism of the 
possibility of distinguishing races by mere 
linear measurements of the bones, and the 
stimulus which these uncertainties have 
given to better methods of obtaining and 
tabulating the data. The practical impor- 
tance of this side of anthropology came out 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. X. No. 250. 
well in the discussion of the merits of meas- 
urements and of finger prints in the identi- 
fication of criminals in India. Dr. Rivers’s 
method of genealogical census and Profes- 
sor Petrie’s system of accurate sequence 
dating for antiquities are also worthy of 
separate mention. i 
The Section of Physiology was that to 
which the President of the Association him- 
self specially belonged, and this may account 
for the numerous papers and reports which 
were presented at the Dover meeting. They 
proved how much need there was for the 
institution of such a Section. The papers 
presented were of scientific importance, but 
were in most cases too technical for ab- 
stracts. 
In the Botanical Section the meetings 
were very successful, and some very inter- 
esting papers were communicated. The 
address of the President, Sir George King, 
dealt with the history and present position 
of Indian botany, and his remarks on the 
unsatisfactory training given in England to 
officers destined for the Indian Forest Ser- 
vice were received with approval. Mr. 
Francis Darwin’s paper on the geotropic 
sensitiveness in plants was a most important 
communication, showing as it did that 
plants are capable of receiving a stimulus 
in a sensitive part which is transmitted to 
another part of the plant and results ina 
definite movement of that part. From Pro- 
fessor M. Ward and his pupils were received 
a number of papers on fungi, and Mr. 
A. C. Seward contributed several papers on 
fossil botany. Mr. Harold Wager, of Leeds, 
dealt with the question of sexuality in fungi, 
and showed that the phenomena are not 
only comparable to those which occur in 
higher plants and animals, but that the 
study of these forms gives an insight into 
the primary meaning of sexuality. One of 
the most important papers was that by Sir 
W. Thiselton-Dyer on the effect of low 
temperatures on the germination of seeds. 
