100 YEARS AGO

The average child is capable of a quality of thinking that leads its elders, when they try to follow it, into an intellectual quagmire of inconsistency and absurdity from which they beat an inglorious retreat by angrily bidding it “not to ask silly questions”. If they bid themselves not to give silly answers their request would be just... I once heard a child ask its mother, “What makes the flowers grow?” Promptly came the answer, “Jesus!” No wonder when children's intellects are muddled with such unprovable assertions that they cease to think... Granting that the results of a mother's pernicious training can be remedied in later life, it is obviously waste of valuable energy, time and money to organise an elaborate system of education to undo that which ought never to have been done. And therefore I urge that our national progress depends very largely upon “the hand that rocks the cradle”: if it rocks with an intelligent purpose, it will be well with our future men; if not, then England, like Tyre, Venice and Rome... “must be led, through prouder eminences, to less pitied destruction.”

From Nature 11 April 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

May I reply to Mr. Tyman's letter in Nature of February 10, p. 245? The Swedish alphabet has twenty-eight letters, of which Å is the twenty-sixth. This letter is not a modified 'A'. The relation of 'Å' to 'A' is somewhat analogous to that of 'W' to 'U'. Unfortunately the British Committee of 1937, oblivious of this, recommended the use of 'A' as an abbreviation for the ångström. The half-dozen examples quoted by Mr. Twyman of the use of 'A' in reports and books written in English since 1937 merely show that the recommendation of this Committee has quite naturally been followed. There will soon appear two English reports on symbols superseding that of 1937. One of these is sponsored by the Royal Society, the Faraday Society and the Physical Society; the other is sponsored by the British Standards Institute. Until these new reports are published, I cannot state with complete certainty what symbol they will recommend for the ångström. I can, however, affirm that both Committees charged with preparing these reports are aware of the distinction between the letters 'Å' and 'A' in Swedish.

From Nature 14 April 1951.