100 YEARS AGO

Under the entrance gate, in the gravel, I saw a light of a brilliant greenish-bluish tint; it moved forward, leaving behind a trail of light which, gradually separating, became a scattered mass of brilliant points. The leading light had the form of a living, curving thread. A lighted match soon showed what the scattered points of light in its trail were, a dozen or so of red ants pursuing the Geophilus; one was clinging to it, each ant shone like a spark in the gravel, the centipede had discharged its fluid over them. I picked up the centipede and dropped it into a tumbler, where it splashed out a mass of light. Hurriedly placing my hand over the tumbler to prevent the insect from escaping, I felt suddenly a strange prickly sensation such as is caused by a slight contact with electricity, so that I hastily removed my hand, calling to a friend who, placing her hand over the tumbler, felt the same thing... Defence seems certainly to be one of the uses of this secretion, attributed by some authors merely to purposes of attraction.

Rose Haig Thomas

From Nature 9 January 1902.

50 YEARS AGO

The arrival at Plymouth on December 6 of the Royal Research Ship Discovery II marked the completion of a twenty-month voyage of oceanographical survey... The Southern Ocean is a continuous belt of deep water encircling a central land mass; in consequence the prevailing currents and water circulation, and the fauna and flora, are distributed in a simpler pattern than in other oceans... A detailed knowledge of the bottom topography of the ocean is essential to the full understanding of the water circulation, and during the recent voyage the Discovery II has supplemented her earlier depth charts by an enormous number of new echo-soundings, and has recorded many continuous bottom profiles, running the sounding machine for long periods. Information of the depths of bottom sediments was also obtained in a number of places by seismic echo soundings with 11/4-lb. explosive charges. Four long bottom cores were obtained in the Indian Ocean with a Kullenberg corer. South of Australia, the corer struck a hard substance — possibly a meteorite — on the bottom; the nose-piece was blocked with hard brownish-black material which had to be chipped out. It was handed to the Geological Department of the University of Western Australia for further examination.

From Nature 12 January 1952.