100 YEARS AGO

A Study of British Genius. Mr. Havelock Ellis recognises three great foci of intellectual ability in England:— (1) the East Anglian focus; (2) the south-western focus; and (3) the focus of the Welsh Border. The first of these is the most recent and the most mixed ethnologically, as East Anglia is very open to invasion, and all kinds of foreigners have settled there. The second is the largest and oldest, and the population has much darker hair; it may be called the Goidelic-Iberian district. The district is defended by Wansdyke and Bokerley Dyke. The third is termed the Anglo-Brythonic district. The Anglo-Danish part of England — Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, and thence into Scotland — has its own peculiar anthropological characters. Its children have usually been more remarkable for force of character than for force of intellect. East Anglia is productive of great statesmen, ecclesiastics and scholars, and of musical composers and painters. It has no aptitude for abstract thinking; its special characters seem to be humanity, patience, grasp of detail, and love of liberty. The people of the south-western focus are sailors rather than scholars, and courtiers rather than statesmen; they are innovators and pioneers in the physical and intellectual worlds, and, above all, are impressive, accomplished, and irresistible personalities. The genius of the Welsh Border is artistic in the widest sense, and notably poetic; there is a tendency to literary and oratorical eloquence, frequently tinged with religious or moral emotion, and there are no scientific men of the first order.

From Nature 21 April 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

The announcement in The Times of April 12 of the production of element number 100 by Prof. G. T. Seaborg and his collaborators at the University of California follows closely on their discovery of element 99... Identification of the new isotope was presumably based on the α-decay systematics, built up by Prof. Seaborg and others, which have proved extremely reliable in this field. Element 100 is stated to behave chemically like erbium, its analogue in the rare-earth group. There is no reason for believing that this will be the last new element to be prepared, although the increasing probability of spontaneous fission as the atomic number advances would appear to limit the total number of elements to about 110.

From Nature 24 April 1954.