50 Years Ago

The dilatory attitude of the Committee on Libraries set up by the University Grants Committee and the Ministry of Education, and the naïve remark in the Robbins Report that “a library adequate to scholarly research is as essential to the efficient running of a university as an adequate range of computers”, fully justifies the anxiety expressed recently by the Master of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge ... Universities, as Dr. D. Thomson pointed out, have managed for centuries without computers, but never without libraries.

From Nature 5 March 1966

100 Years Ago

We notice in La Geographie for November, 1915, that the hydrographic department of the French Admiralty have replaced the German names in Kerguelen by names of French origin. It must be very galling to the French to see an abundance of German names scattered over the chart of their Antarctic island, especially as German explorers were never very sparing in their naming ... however, the practice of changing established names is a dangerous one if carried far, and it is to be hoped ... this principle will not be applied indiscriminately, for confusion would certainly be the result.

ALSO:

Those who are inclined to doubt whether museums play any useful part in war-time should read the account of what is being done in the Leicester Museum, by means of an Infant Welfare Exhibition, to combat the appalling mortality among infants ... This mortality, which is largely preventable, is brought out with startling vividness by means of a series of wooden columns, that for infants up to twelve months old standing no fewer than 11 ft. high, while that for the death-rate between the ages from five to twenty is but 2¾ of an inch high.

From Nature 2 March 1916 Footnote 1