B. A. A. S.

At Cambridge, England, last week, where the British Association for the Advancement of Science was assembled for its summer meeting, two distinguished scientists were much in evidence. One was Robert John Strutt, Baron Rayleigh (pronounced "ray-lee"), an authority on radioactivity, son of the late' great Rayleigh who was best known for his discovery of the "noble" gases (helium, argon, etc.). This year, Lord Rayleigh, 63, is the B. A. A. S. president, and therefore was expected to make British Science's annual philosophical discourse, avoiding grubby details. In his address, Lord Ray leigh defended Science against the charge that it has made war horrible, using the now-familiar argument that the deadliest weapons of modern war -- e.g., high explosives, airplanes, poison gas -- were developed for peaceful purposes.

The other obvious notable was Dr.Charles Galton Darwin, mathematician and scientific philosopher of Christ's Col lege, Cambridge, grandson of Charles Dar win, proponent of evolution by natural selection. As president of the section on mathematical and physical sciences, Dr.Darwin delivered a neat talk on logic in science, in which he told a story from Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. When Stooge Watson complimented Detective Holmes for a shrewd guess, Holmes pro tested: "No, no, I never guess. It is a shocking habit, destructive of the logical faculty. ... I could only say what was the balance of probability." Detective Holmes, said Mathematician Darwin, was using the real scientific method. Another tidbit of popular science disclosed at the meeting:

Most famous human fossil discovered in England is the Piltdown skull, picked up as a succession of fragments in Sussex gravel by Charles Dawson between 1912 and 1914. Piltdown was placed in a separate genus (Eoanthropus) of the human family, of which Homo sapiens is only a species; he was considered to be 100,000 to 300,000 years old. Not long ago a London dentist and amateur archeologist named Alvan T. Marston found in gravel at Swanscombe, Kent some human skull fragments which he thought to be of antiquity comparable with the Piltdown skull (TIME, Oct. 12, 1936). Academic anthropologists at first paid him no heed. But when the Swanscombe relic was examined under scholastic auspices, it was seen to be a remarkable thing indeed. Indubitably ancient, though probably not quite so old as the Piltdown, it had modern anatomical features. Anthropologist Sir Arthur Keith, who is 72, gave it as his opinion that the Swanscombe skull is the most important fossil discovery made in England during his lifetime.

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