50 YEARS AGO

“The English Climate” — In this engagingly written volume Dr. C. E. P. Brooks describes the climate of Britain in relation to the major factors controlling it as well as the various weather processes and seasonal vicissitudes which make it up... In the chapter on “Fog and Soot” much prominence is given to the disastrous ‘smog’ of December 1952. The heavy death-rate from bronchitis and pneumonia is apparently attributed in the main to sulphur dioxide and soot... No reference is made in this chapter to modern smoke-abatement practices and changed methods of domestic heating as bearing on the experience of the older generation that London fogs to-day have lost the sooty blackness of Victorian times.

From Nature 11 June 1955.

100 YEARS AGO

An article entitled “Some Candid Impressions of England” is contributed to the current number of the National Review by a “German Resident”. The first fact which strikes the contributor is the indifference of Englishmen to their duties as citizens of a great Empire, and it seems to him, looking at English schools, that the mainspring of German success is here. He says:—“Our youths, like your youths, are human, and would be lazy if there were no penalty for idleness... I look at England and see the want of such an influence even in your public schools, which are good in a way, so far as they form character, but bad in that they neglect intellect.”... The majority of our workers, he remarks, read little but the sporting Press, and care for little but betting and sport. It is pointed out that the Germans have destroyed in this generation the superstition that Germany makes only poor and cheap articles. “Our Mercedes motors and scientific and optical instruments are the best and most expensive in the world, and no English article of their class can for a moment compete with them.”

From Nature 8 June 1905.