100 YEARS AGO

Mr A. Hall, of Highbury, has designed an almanac with the object of eliminating the inconvenience consequent on the various days of the months falling on different week days, owing to the changing number of days in each month. His scheme is to make New Year's Day separate from the rest, calling it January 0, and then divide the remaining 364 days into thirteen months of twenty-eight days each. Following this plan, therefore, any particular day of the month will always fall on the same day of the week, and this would, of course, be convenient for many purposes. The extra month he proposes to denote by the name “Christember.” The almanac sent us is printed on this principle, and a useful item included is the table of corresponding dates between the Gregorian, Julian, Jewish and Mohammedan calendars.

From Nature 27 April 1899.

50 YEARS AGO

During Easter 1947, an inspection was made of the seaweed cast up on the west mainland of Orkney. One heavy cast, 3 ft. thick at the water's edge, was found in a sandy bay north of the graveyard northwest of Stromness ⃛. There is little chance of anything remaining intact before being cast ashore as the Atlantic waters break on this coast. The cast weed on this occasion, composed mainly of the fronds of Laminaria Cloustoni, had acted as a buffer for several large shells, such as Pecten, which were found intact. Normally, such shells become so broken up that they merely add to the shell sand comprising the foreshore in this region. From among the cast weed a bivalve, 4 in. long, was picked up which when discovered had its two halves hinged; the contents were absent. It has now been identified as Tellina magna, a native of the East American coast, North Carolina to West Indies — and is, I am informed, the first recorded instance of a marine invertebrate from the American continent to be found in British waters. Subsequent visits to the same area have produced only limpet shells and one small bivalve. There can be no doubt the cast weed was responsible for bringing the shell ashore intact. How the animal (or its ancestors) crossed the Atlantic can only be speculation.

From Nature 30 April 1949.