528 The British Association. [October, 
this winter, and I anticipate finding this capacity extremely 
small ; for although we found that the specific inductive 
capacity of a moderately good vacuum made in a space ori- 
ginally containing air was as much as nine-tenths of that of 
air at ordinary pressure, still Mr. Crookes’s recent experi- 
ments connected with his radiometer on the logarithmic 
decrement of a torsion pendulum vibrating in gaseous or 
vacuous spaces show that the viscosity of the gas does not 
much diminish until the vacuum has become very perfect. 
Consequently, it may be anticipated that it will be at the 
completion of the exhaustion (with a most perfect Sprengel 
pump) of a gas condenser that the great diminution in the 
specific inductive capacity of the vacuous dielectric will be 
experienced. If this result be really arrived at, then it will 
follow that if it were possible to insulate a conducting wire 
in a vacuum tube under the sea, the speed of telegraph 
messages through a long submarine cable, such as crosses 
the Atlantic or Indian Oceans, could be raised from the pre- 
sent low speed of seventeen words a minute to that of one 
thousand, which has already been obtained on land lines with 
Bain’s automatic instruments. I may also mention 
that the mathematical reduction of the curves of vis- 
cores yielding, soaking out of charge in dielectrics, &c., 
will form the subject of a paper Mr. Perry and I propose 
publishing very shortly. 
Chemical Science. (Section B.) 
The President, Professor Maxwell Simpson, F.R.S., in 
delivering the opening address, brought before the section 
the claims of chemical science to a place in general educa- 
tion, and the claims of original research to a place in the 
curriculum for higher degrees in our universities. 
Without chemistry, he said, we can know nothing of the 
air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we eat ; we 
cannot understand the process of combustion, respiration, 
fermentation, putrefaction, or the endless chemical changes 
which are continually in operation around us, and which 
affeCt our lives for good or for evil. The whole of the 
phenomena of nature must for ever remain to us, more or 
less, an inscrutable mystery. Was it not also desirable that 
we should have some acquaintance with the chemical arts 
from which we derive so many of our comforts and luxuries; 
Should we not know something of the arts of photography, 
dyeing, metallurgy — something of the manufacture of glass 
and china, and of the thousand beautiful things that are 
