August 24, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



255 



gineer, in the Reclamation Service of the 

 Geological Survey, at $150 to $250 a month. 

 The great majority of these positions are for 

 field service in the western part of the United 

 States and in places remote from cities and 

 ordinary lines of transportation. 



Lord Kelvin writes as follows to the Lon- 

 don Times : " In your yesterday's issue, under 

 heading ' British Association,' I read ' In the 

 Mathematical and Physical Section, a discus- 

 sion was opened by Professor Soddy on the 

 possible transmutation of the elements. * * * 

 The statement that the production of helium 

 from radium has established the fact of the 

 gradual evolution of one element into others 

 was not seriously questioned.' I wish to re- 

 mark that an isolated experimental discovery 

 by Sir William Eamsay and Professor Soddy, 

 brilliantly interesting as it is and solidly in- 

 structive as it is towards the theory of ra- 

 dium, suggests nothing more towards any 

 modification of the atomic doctrine proposed 

 some 2,500 years ago by Democritus, and uni- 

 versally adopted by chemists and other philos- 

 ophers in the nineteenth century, than does 

 Ramsay's original discovery of helium as an 

 emanation from the mineral clevite. The ob- 

 vious conclusion from the two discoveries is 

 that clevite and radium both contain helium. 

 I can not refer, thus publicly, to discussions 

 on radium in the meeting of the British Asso- 

 ciation which commenced last Wednesday in 

 York without protesting against the hypoth- 

 esis that the heat of the sun or earth, or 

 other bodies in the universe, is due to radium. 

 I believe it is mainly due to gravitation; and 

 I believe that the experimental results on 

 which the radium hypothesis has been built 

 give no foundation on which it can rest." 



An experimental and teaching station for 

 the study of economic plants and the home 

 production of medicinal and industrial vege- 

 table products was opened last month near 

 Landskrona in Sweden. The establishment, 

 erected by the provisions of Consul Oscar 

 Ekman, of Stockholm, was dedicated to the 

 Swedish nation under the name Esperanza. 

 Consul Ekman, now in his ninety-fourth year 

 «nd formerly associated with the Carnegie 



industrial interests, previously donated con- 

 siderable sums to the universities of Upsala 

 and Goteborg, and has been active for many 

 years also in the promotion of popular en- 

 lightenment. In the establishment of the new 

 station he was guided mainly by a desire of 

 resuscitating the home culture of useful 

 plants formerly quite common, as well as by 

 the fact that raw materials of this class are 

 now being imported into Sweden at a great 

 cost. Among the problems first to be con- 

 sidered are the cultivation of mint. The oil 

 of peppermint never was produced on a scale 

 sufficient for the demand, and Sweden's sup- 

 ply thereof is nearly all imported. The home 

 production of chamomilla, a plant formerly 

 cultivated about every country home; the cul- 

 tivation on a large scale of caraway, pigment 

 plants, textile and fiber herbs is also con- 

 sidered. Two directors have been appointed. 

 The botanical work is in charge of Director 

 Tom von Post, of the IJpsala Seed Control 

 Station, who made an investigation, last year, 

 of the principal European centers of pepper- 

 mint culture. Mr. Hjalmar Lindstrom, a 

 practical pharmacist of Landskrona, will have 

 charge of the technical and industrial branches 

 of the work. 



D. H. Ross, Canadian commercial agent at 

 Melbourne, reports that two Australian in- 

 ventors have discovered a new process for the 

 continuous treatment of iron ore, and he says 

 that the results they have achieved are so suc- 

 cessful that the process is to be exploited 

 throughout the world. It is called the Hes- 

 kett-Moore process for directly converting 

 iron ore into malleable iron or steel by a con- 

 tinuous system, and it is claimed effects a 

 saving of 25 per cent, in the manufacture. 

 The ore is simply concentrated by ordinary 

 methods, or if it is magnetic it is separated 

 electrically until the pure oxide of iron is 

 obtained. The oxide of iron is passed through 

 a revolving cylinder heated by waste gases 

 from subsequent operations and brought in 

 that cylinder to a dull red heat. It drops 

 from the cylinder to a second similar cylinder, 

 and in the latter it is brought into contact 

 with the deoxidizing gas, which is forced 



