Abstract
ALTHOUGH the president of section B, Prof. W. H. Perkin, junr., is mainly known as a specialist on polymethylene compounds, his address upon the teaching of inorganic chemistry proved to be of very general interest and was enthusiastically received by a large audience. His contention that the present system of examinations would be advantageously superseded by an inspection of the students' laboratory notebooks was favourably commented upon by Sir H. E. Roscoe and Dr. H. E. Armstrong, although it was admitted that the practical difficulties in the way of such a method are very considerable. The presidential address was followed by the report of the committee on the teaching of science in elementary schools, of which Dr. J. H. Gladstone is chairman; the report consisted principally of a discussion of the returns of the Education Department in so far as they concern the teaching of elementary science. The debate which ensued materially assisted the strong case which was subsequently made out in favour of establishing a separate section of the Association for dealing with educational matters. A paper was next read by Dr. Letts and Mr. R. F. Blake on some problems connected with atmospheric carbonic anhydride and on a new and accurate method for determining its amount, suitable for scientific expeditions; attention was drawn to the variations in the amount of atmospheric carbonic anhydride, and possible explanations of the variations were considered. The authors determine carbonic anhydride in air by absorbing it from about six litres with caustic potash solution, subsequently liberating it by boiling the potash solution with acid in a vacuum and measuring the volume of the carbonic anhydride in a suitable eudiometer. Mr. W. Ackroyd contributed papers on the distribution of chlorine in West Yorkshire and on a limiting standard of acidity for moorland waters. Water from the upper reaches of the West Yorkshire rivers contain from 0.7 to 1.3 parts of chlorine per 100,000, but as the sea or a more populous district is approached, the chlorine number becomes much greater. No cases of plumbism have yet been traced to the solvent action upon lead pipes of water of which the acidity is less than the equivalent of 0.5 part of sulphuric acid per 100,000; this acidity value is therefore tentatively proposed as a limiting standard for potable waters of moorland origin. Dr. T. W. Hime read a paper on the effects of copper on the human body, in which he sought to show that the agitation against the use of articles of food containing small quantities of copper salts is unjustifiable, because a large number of well-known food stuffs contain copper as a normal constituent and because such articles of food exert no poisonous action at all. Reports were received from the committees on the bibliography of spectroscopy and on the preparation of a new series of wave-length tables of the spectra of the elements. Prof. H. B. Dixon and Mr. F. W. Rixon, in a paper on the specific heat of gases at temperatures up to 400°, showed an apparatus for making such determinations at constant volume in which a steel cylinder containing the gas is heated and dropped into a calorimeter; the preliminary results obtained with carbonic anhydride were stated. Mr. F. H. Neville communicated a report on the chemical compounds contained in alloys of which the following is a brief abstract. Intermetallic compounds may be compared with the unstable compounds of the halogens with each other and with sulphur; they often bear a great superficial resemblance to their constituent elements and appear to show marked dissociation, or to form systems in true equilibrium with the liquid mixture of their components.
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Chemistry at the British Association . Nature 62, 566–568 (1900). https://doi.org/10.1038/062566a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/062566a0