100 years ago

Mr. H. Savage Landor, who left England in March last, commissioned by Mr. Harmsworth, the proprietor of the Daily Mail, to endeavour to enter the sacred city of Lhassa, in Tibet, has not been successful in his undertaking. News has just been received that a few days after crossing the frontier of Tibet, disguised as a Chinese pilgrim, all except two of Mr. Landor's men abandoned him. In spite of this, Mr. Landor continued on his journey, but eventually he lost all his provisions, and by an act of treachery was made a prisoner by the Tibetans. He was sentenced to be beheaded, but at the last moment the Grand Lama stopped the executioner, and commuted the sentence of decapitation to the torture of the stretching log — a kind of rack upon which Mr. Landor was chained for eight days — after which he was released. Mr. Landor has now returned to India, suffering from the effects of the torture to which he was subjected, and which he half anticipated before he set out upon his hazardous journey.

From Nature 7 October 1897.

50 years ago

From the obituary of Hans Fischer, “to whom we owe most of our knowledge of the chemistry of hæmin, chlorophyll and the bile-pigments”. Fischer, who won a Nobel prize in 1930, died on 31 March 1945, but Nature only became aware of his death several months later.

There was an atmosphere of unusual jollity in [his] laboratory, directed in its legitimate expression by Herr Paulus, the store-keeper, and controlled, in its more outrageous excesses, by Fischer's tact and humour. A fledgling ‘doctor’, returning from his oral examination — a formality — found his bench littered with the starting materials for a celebration and a large blackboard, on which a cartoon and some lines of doggerel reminded him that he was mortal. More rarely, there were occasions in the cellars, and at Christmas the supply of 5-litre flasks was exhausted as all undertook the preparation of ‘christmas-pyrrole’ by a process supposed to render denatured alcohol potable.

• We regret also to announce the death of Prof. Max Planck, For.Mem.R.S., on October 4, aged eighty-nine.

From Nature 11 October 1947.