50 YEARS AGO

This is the centenary year of the Meteorological Office, and through its long record meteorologists have been confronted with dynamical problems of such complexity that their solution has sometimes seemed beyond hope. In recent years, however, nothing less than a revolution has taken place... The staff of the Napier Shaw Research Laboratory of the Meteorological Office...have shown that weather maps giving isobars and upper air contours may be predicted for 24 hr. ahead.

From Nature 3 December 1955.

100 YEARS AGO

Nature Through Microscope and Camera. By Richard Kerr. One of the many ways of beginning the study of natural science is with a “beauty-feast” — of flowers or birds, of shells or gems, of anything — for all natural things are beautiful, in their proper setting at least. It is an old-fashioned mode of approach, commending itself to children and simple minds, but one which often leads far beyond aesthetic pleasure to the joy of understanding. It affords a dynamic to investigation, and fosters a healthy reverence for things. Indeed, if we had to choose, we should prefer admiration without science to science without admiration. But a simple book like that before us shows that there is no necessary antithesis; it is a disclosure of beautiful things, and yet within its limits it is quite scientific.

The author's aim is to illustrate with well chosen examples the beauty of minute structure, the beauty which the microscope discloses, and he is to be congratulated on his success... we are here brought into close quarters with the familiar, with diatoms and Foraminifera, the whelk's radula and the barnacle's cirri, the butterfly's “tongue” and the scales of the sole... The photographs were taken by Mr. Arthur E. Smith, and are certainly among the finest that have ever been published.

From Nature 30 November 1905.