November 15, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



763 



made by the president of an educational 

 institute. As a result of the discussion a 

 committee was appointed to take what 

 steps it could to procure duty-free alco- 

 hol and ether for chemical research. Dr. 

 A. G. Green read a paper on ' The Deca- 

 dence of the Coal Tar Industry in Great 

 Britain and its Growth in Germany ' of 

 which an abstract was given on page 663 of 

 Science. The report of the Committee on 

 preparing a new Series of Wave-length 

 Tables of the Spectra of the Elements was 

 presented. The next day, after papers by 

 Professor A. Brown on 'Enzyme Action,' 

 and by Professor W. Marckwald, of Berlin, 

 oh ' Radium,' with demonstrations, the 

 Section resolved itself into parts, one, under 

 the president, considering sanitary and 

 allied matters ; the other, under Sir William 

 Roberts- Austen, F.R.S., hearing metal- 

 lurgical papers. In the former subsection. 

 Professor E. A. Letts read a paper by him- 

 self and Mr. R. F. Blake on ' The Chemical 

 and Biological Changes occurring during 

 the Treatment of Sewage by the so-called 

 Bacteria Beds,' in which it was pointed out 

 that in the bacterial treatment of sewage in 

 contact beds the organic nitrogen in the 

 crude sewage was not all converted into 

 the oxidized form of nitrate, this loss 

 being partially due to the formation of free 

 nitrogen, which was either evolved as gas 

 or carried away dissolved in the effluent, 

 and partly due to nitrogen absorbed into 

 the tissues of animals and plants that feed 

 on the sewage. Dr. S. Rideal in the next 

 paper pointed out that the loss of nitrogen 

 was caused in part by a black humus sub- 

 stance, allied to peat, which he had found 

 was formed in all the present methods 

 of bacterial process. This substance con- 

 tained seven per cent, of nitrogen and 

 was so stable that it did not decompose 

 or give rise to smell, even if it was 

 broken. Dr. Rideal also contributed a 

 paper on 'Sulphuric Acid as a Typhoid 



Disinfectant,' in which he said that the out- ' 

 break of enteric fever among the troops in 

 South Africa had led Dr. Porter and him- 

 self to try to find a chemical salt that could 

 be added to infected water by soldiers on 

 the march and would insure the death of 

 the typhoid germ, if present. Such a salt 

 is sodium bisulphate, and a gram to the 

 pint, after fifteen minutes, purified the 

 water, while four grams of sulphuric acid 

 to the gallon freed sewage or drainage 

 water from typhoid organisms. Mr. Wm. 

 Ackroyd read a paper on ' The Inverse Re- 

 lation of Chlorine to Rainfall,' in which he 

 showed that when daily estimations of the 

 amount of chlorine were made it clearly 

 appeared that minimum amounts of rain- 

 fall were marked by maximum amounts of 

 chlorine contents and vice versa. Mr. Ac- 

 kroyd also detailed the results of his inves- 

 tigation of the distribution of chlorine in 

 Yorkshire. A report was made by the Com- 

 mittee on the Relation between the Absorp- 

 tion Spectra and Chemical Constitution of 

 Organic Substances. 



Among the papers before the Metal- 

 lurgical subsection, one of the most inter- 

 esting was on ' The Minute Structure of 

 Metals,' by Mr. G. T. Beilby, from which it 

 appeared that the microscopical examina- 

 tion of metallic surfaces, produced in vari- 

 ous ways, showed that the metal substance 

 appeared in them as minute granules or 

 scales, or as a transparent glass-like sub- 

 stance. The persistence of these minute 

 scales under all kinds of mechanical and 

 thermal treatment, the remarkable uni- 

 formity of their size and appearance in 

 metals of all the leading groups, their dis- 

 appearance into the transparent form and 

 their reappearance again, apparently un- 

 changed in size or otherwise, all these 

 seemed to afford fair ground for the con- 

 jecture that they were in some way definite 

 units in the structure of metals. Mr. 

 Beilby also submitted a joint paper by 



