100 YEARS AGO

An instructive fisheries exhibition, arranged to illustrate the fishing industries and the application of science to agriculture, was opened in the Zoological Museum of the University College, Liverpool, on Friday last⃛. As Prof. Herdman pointed out at the opening ceremony of the exhibition, fishes are animals, their food is composed of animals, and their enemies are animals. In all the operations of their life, their feeding and breeding, and so on, they are subject to the same biological laws which regulate the lives of all animals in the sea. The investigation of fishery questions is applied biology, and if our fisheries are to be benefited they must be treated in a scientific manner. We do not trust to unaided nature for our supplies of bread-stuffs and beef. Why then should we trust to nature for fish? As there is an agriculture of the land, so there must be an aquiculture of the sea. Fishermen must in the future be farmers of the sea-shore, not hunters as they have been in the past.

From Nature 4 November 1897.

50 YEARS AGO

During the present century, a new ‘slave-trade’ has arisen. Individuals are torn from their native element and are made to perform functions entirely foreign to them; immense coercion is applied to make them perform these functions; and when they have performed them they are carelessly discarded. Since the existence of these individuals — electrons — was first recognized fifty years ago, man has transformed out of all recognition his power and control over them. We are now not sure of the exact nature of the electron. Is it a particle or a wave packet? But whatever it is, wave-mechanics leads to no suggestion that the electron has a soul; and so man can, for the present, continue his slave-trade without any qualms of conscience. The exhibition arranged by the North-West Branch of the Institution of Electronics and held at the College of Technology, Manchester, during July 22-23, might justly be described as a tour of the torture chambers of the electrons, the scale of tortures being finely graded from the mere interchange of habitat, as in accumulators, to the dragging out into free space and violent oscillation that occurs in high-frequency valves.

From Nature 8 November 1947