50 Years Ago

On December 19 Lord Mills announced in the House of Lords that the Government, after considering the question of decimal coinage ... thought real advantage would follow from adopting a decimal currency. In view of the widespread use of accounting and other monetary machinery, the transitional cost would be substantial, but could be limited by choice of the size of the new units and careful timing of the change-over.

From Nature 13 January 1962

100 Years Ago

Mr. E. C. Snow, in his paper entitled “The Intensity of Natural Selection in Man” ... has set himself to answer the following question: Has heavy infantile mortality any selective value or tendency to eliminate the more sickly and to spare the hardier children? Of the data available for the investigation of this problem, the most satisfactory are derived from the annual volumes of Prussian statistics ... Thirty rural districts in Prussia were taken, and all the children in them born in the year 1881 were considered. It was ascertained for each district how many of these children died in the first two years of life and how many in the next eight ... If the infantile mortality tends to weed out the weaker children, then in those districts in which the mortality among the children born in 1881 was highest in the years 1881 and 1882 it should tend to be lowest in the years 1883–90, since stronger children less likely to succumb to the ailments of childhood would have survived their first two years ... We are of the opinion that, on the whole, the author is justified in saying: “Natural selection in the form of a selective death-rate is strongly operative in man in the earlier years of life.”

From Nature 11 January 1912