100 YEARS AGO

The little Warwickshire village of Stockton, ploughed and excavated by three manufacturing cement firms, has long yielded to collectors choice specimens of Lower Middle Lias fossils. Its late rector educated the quarrymen by lectures and in conversation [and] left them with a prediction that a perfect monster would some day be unearthed⃛ A week or two ago, the prediction was fulfilled, and the advice remembered. The wielder of a pickaxe suddenly announced that he was “grapplin' along a lot of backbones”; the work was stopped, the foreman summoned, and slowly with due precaution a noble Icthyosaurus was uncovered. He lies 45 feet below the surface; 20 feet in length and 3 feet 10 inches across.

From Nature 1 September 1898.

50 YEARS AGO

From September 13 to September 17 the American Association for the Advancement of Science will hold in Washington, D.C., the centennial celebration of its founding⃛ Beginning with 1900 each member received with his membership a subscription for the weekly journal Science, and since 1915 a subscription for either Science or The Scientific Monthly. At the beginning of this calendar year (1948) the annual membership dues, including a subscription for either of the two journals, became 6.50 dollars a year.

From Nature 4 September 1948.

figure 1

Figure 1