August 5, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



161 



UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS. 



Mes. Emily Peiscilla Edgell Hunt has 

 bequeathed £5,000 to King's College School, 

 London, for scholarships to be awarded for 

 proficiency in practical sciences. She also be- 

 queathed £1,000 to the benevolent fund of 

 the Institution of Civil Engineers, and large 

 sums to London hospitals. 



Sir WiLLi.iM Eraser has bequeathed £35,000 

 aad half the residue of his estate to the Uni- 

 versity of Edinburgh. 



The Edinburgh Uuiversity Court has ap- 

 pointed to the new professor-sbip of public 

 health and sanitary science at Edinburgh 

 University Dr. Charles Hunter Stewart, who 

 for the past ten years has acted as chief assist- 

 ant in the bacteriological laboratory connected 

 with the chair of medical jurisprudence and 

 public health in Edinburgh University. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 

 SCIENCE IN THE BUREAU OF EDUCATION. 



Doubtless a large number of the readers of 

 Science have just received the first volume of 

 the Report of the Commissioner of Education 

 for 1896-97, and after remarking on its unusu- 

 ally prompt appearance have put it away un- 

 opened, to await some emergency in which its 

 statistics may be useful. It may be desirable 

 to call attention to the fact that this report is 

 distinguished above its fellows by a most re- 

 markable article on ' Recent Contributions of 

 Biology, Sociology and Metallurgy to the Cur- 

 riculum of Agricultural Colleges. ' This forms 

 Chapter 20 of the Report, pp. 923-1080. It is 

 of the biological section that I wish to speak. 



Considering that the article deals with ' re- 

 cent contributions,' it is rather surprising to 

 find the amount of space given to quotations 

 from De Saussure and Liebig. But it is still 

 more surprising to find that the author quotes 

 with approval on p. 945 the statement of the 

 former writer that ' ' plants do not take all their 

 mineral food out of solutions such as those 

 which are artificially made, * * * but they take 

 them for the most part from compounds which 

 we are unable to form, namely, out of such 

 compounds in which these salts are chemically 

 combined with oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen and 



carbon in humus extract, a fact that can only 

 be revealed to us by an examination of the 

 ashes of the plant." It would seem that the 

 writer had never heard of water-cultures. 



After giving quantitative proof (from de Saus- 

 sure and Boussingault) of the absorption of CO., 

 and the giving- ofl^ of O by green leaves, the re- 

 mark follows, p. 929: " It is quite safe, then, 

 to say that the leaf eats (so to speak) of carbon, 

 and that indirectly it takes this from the air, 

 though it must never be forgotten that the cap- 

 ital function of the leaf is, to use an expression 

 necessitated by our ignorance, ' to elaborate ' 

 the sap. Why the leaf should act thus through 

 a green substance it contains called chlorophyll 

 has engaged the attention of many, but there is 

 something about the question that stunts the 

 gi-owth of an hypothesis." (!!) 



' ' The root is an apparatus to absorb water. 

 It is composed of three parts ; a cap or penetrat- 

 ing point, a muff of fine hairs which follows 

 close behind the cap, and finally an arm or the 

 body proper of the root, which is at once an an- 

 chor, an alimentary canal and a pump." (p. 931.) 



Apparently the Jews of the Education Bureau 

 have no dealings with the Samaritans of the 

 Department of Agriculture, or the writer would 

 hardly have said that agrostology is the Gallic 

 name for soil physics. And he might have 

 found a zoologist to tell him that ' the substance 

 resembling cellulose called tunicine ' is not so 

 called ' from its being found only in the mantle 

 which covers the body of oysters and other mol- 

 lusks.' He might also have been shown a speci- 

 men of growing yeast, and one of Protococcus, 

 which would have kept him from evolving the- 

 'diagrammatic sketches' of theseplants on p. 971. 



It is impossible to do justice to this writer 

 without longer citations than Science probably 

 can afford space for. I will simply mention 

 some of the most striking passages. There is 

 some fine confused reading in the account of 

 the nitrogen question, on pp. 929-940, though 

 Schloesing and Miintz, Hellriegel and Wilfarth, 

 are quoted in some detail. The gem of the 

 chapter is, however, the section on the life-pro- 

 cess and instinct of the plant, and particularly 

 the subsection on the ' development of the male 

 cell (i. e., pollen-grain) in the ovary,' from 

 which it appears that " antecedent to the fecun- 



