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From H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (since 1866), 2 vols (London: Victor Gollancz and the Cresset Press, 1934) vol. II, pp. 539–41. The ‘eventful evening’ to which Wells refers was the first night of Henry James’s Guy Domville at the St James’s Theatre on 5 January 1895. Shaw was there for the Saturday Review, and Wells for the Pall Mall Gazette. The play was a complete failure, though Shaw wrote sympathetically about some aspects of it in his review (see Shaw, Our Theatres in the Nineties [London: Constable, 1948] I, 6–9).

At first he impressed me, as he impressed Henry James, as the strangest of creatures. He was rather short and round-shouldered with his head as it were sunken into his body. He had a dark retreating face with a very carefully trimmed and pointed beard, a trouble-wrinkled forehead and very troubled dark eyes, and the gestures of his hands and arms were from the shoulders and very Oriental indeed. He reminded people of Du Maurier’s Svengali and, in the nautical trimness of his costume, of Cutcliffe Hyne’s Captain Kettle.1 He spoke English strangely. Not badly altogether; he would supplement his vocabulary — especially if he were discussing cultural or political matters — with French words; but with certain oddities. He had learnt to read English long before he spoke it and he had formed wrong sound impressions of many familiar words; he had for example acquired an incurable tendency to pronounce the last e in these and those. He would say, ‘Wat shall we do with thesa things?’ And he was always incalculable about the use of ‘shall’ and ‘will’. When he talked of seafaring his terminology was excellent but when he turned to less familiar topics he was often at a loss for phrases.

Participants in conversation have at their disposal many ways of showing that their speaking-turn is complete. An important resource for achieving this interactive task is provided by phonetic features. However, the precise role of these features has been obscured because analysts have relied too heavily on their intuitions, particularly about intonational meaning. Drawing on techniques developed within Conversation Analysis we give a precise formulation of the role of phonetic features in turn-delimitation in the speech of London Jamaicans. We show that turn-delimitation in London Jamaican may be signalled by features of pitch, loudness and rhythm centred on the last syllable of the turn. In this respect, London Jamaican is different from some other varieties of English.

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of theinteractionalimplications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.

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THE other day I listened with great pleasure to Sir Richard Gregory's Aldred Lecture1, and admired once again his instinct for bringing together into the most fruitful association, facts and consequences lying far apart, and extracting wide suggestions and new problems from the assemblage. But the readers of NATURE do not need to be reminded that Sir Richard was a brilliant editor so that without any sacrifice of its world-wide scientific usefulness he also made this weekly journal a medium of interpretation and understanding between one type of specialist and another and between specialists in general and the man of general intelligence and broad curiosity outside the ranks of the specialist worker. The Royal Society began as an assembly of curious gentlemen, amateurs all, and how else could it have begun? It could include Pepys, for example, to his great benefit certainly and maybe to its own.

THE scientific precision and modernness of a book of elementary physiology, written by Dr. Shore, under the supervision of Prof. Foster, is scarcely to be called in question. This little volume is amply ill ustrated, and written with clearness as well as exactness. The authors are especially to be commended for laying stress in their preface upon the necessity of a preliminary acquaintance with Chemistry and Physics, and it is to be regretted that they had not the courage to insist upon this point. But here they are gravely open to criticism. “Knowing,” they say, “how frequently a book on physiology is taken up without any such previous acquaintance, we have given a few chemical and physical facts as preliminaries in chapter i.” A few, and quite too few, it is—six complete pages—expanding scarcely any of the principles which are involved in the simplest physiological explanation, giving, of course, no conceptions of the relations of chemical combination to energy, nor of osmose, diffusion, solution, isomerism, nor the action of ferments, all of which come to the front directly one approaches respiration or digestion. We cannot but think that this concession to a common educational error is greatly to be deplored. The authors occupy a position of authority, and it was their privilege—a privilege they have neglected—to demand here, by assuming a sound basis of chemical and physical knowledge, the proper sequence of studies. As it is they have produced a little primer that by virtue of its clearness and attractiveness and the prestige of their names, will serve to uphold for a few years longer a fundamentally faulty system of scientific education. Physiology for Beginners. By Professor M. Foster Lewis E. Shore (London: Macmillan and Co., 1894.) Outlines of Biology. By P. Chalmers Mitchell (London: Methuen and Co., 1894.) Practical Methods in Microscopy. By C. H. Clark (Boston: Heath and Co., 1894.)

IT is not often that a reviewer is called upon to write art criticism in the columns of NATURE. But the circumstances of the “Evergreen” are peculiar; it is published with a certain scientific sanction as the expression of a coming scientific Renascence of Art, and it is impossible to avoid glancing at its aesthetic merits. It is a semi-annual periodical emanating from the biological school of St. Andrews University. Mr. J. Arthur Thomson assists with the proem and the concluding article (“The Scots Renascence”), and other significant work in the volume is from the pen of Prof. Patrick Geddes. It may be assumed that a large section of the public will accept this volume as being representative of the younger generation of biological workers, and as indicating the aesthetic tendencies of a scientific training. What injustice may be done thereby a glance at the initial Almanac will show. In this page of “Scots Renascence” design the beautiful markings on the carapace of a crab and the exquisite convolutions of a ram's horn are alike replaced by unmeaning and clumsy spirals, the delicate outlines of a butterfly body by a gross shape like a soda-water bottle; its wings are indicated by three sausage-shaped excrescences on either side, and the vegetable forms in the decorative border are deprived of all variety and sinuosity in favour of a system of cast-iron semicircular curves. Now, as a matter of fact, provided there is no excess of diagram, his training should render the genuine biologist more acutely sensitive to these ugly and unmeaning distortions than the average educated man. Neither does a biological training blind the eye to the quite fortuitous arrangement of the black masses in Mr. Duncan's studies in the art of Mr. Beardsley, to the clumsy line of Mr. Mackie's reminiscences of Mr. Walter Crane, or to the amateurish quality of Mr. Burn-Murdoch. And when Mr. Riccardo Stephens honours Herrick on his intention rather than his execution, and Mr. Laubach, rejoicing “with tabret and string” at the advent of spring, bleats The Evergreen. A Northern Seasonal. Published in the Lawnmarket of Edinburgh by Patrick Geddes and Colleagues. (London: Fisher Unwin, 1895.)

IT is the fate of many symposia to fail as a whole by the very excellence of the parts; relationship and proximity as well as stars are needed to form a constellation; and this unsatisfactoriness of ensemble is all too manifest in this well-intentioned volume that the Master of Downing has gathered together rather than edited, to which Lord Moulton contributes an introduction. Individually the chapters are of the utmost interest to the general reader; they give him compactly and authoritatively a sound idea of the scope and value of contemporary work in chemistry, physics, botany, geology, medicine, mathematics, and anthropology by such eminent Cambridge hands as Profs. Pope, Bragg, Hobson, Biffen, Wood, Nuttall, and Gowland Hopkins; and it is only when his heart, glowing responsively, demands, And in return for all these benefits, in a lively hope of more to come, in the desire for more to come, what do you want the general public to do for you? that the book becomes ineffective. This is not for want of a common intention. There are clear indications of a common intention to cry up pure science and to insist upon the importance of scientific studies and scientific research, but the cry never becomes more than a vague cry, and the need of the present time is for definite proposals. The present reviewer, who is a journalist very anxious for the advancement of science and very eager to serve it if he can, turns from this book with an uncomfortable sense that scientific men have still to develop a definite policy with regard. to schools and colleges and higher education. They do not seem to realise how far science progress is bound up with these matters. Science and the Nation. Essays by Cambridge Graduates, with an Introduction by the Rt. Hon. Lord Moulton. Edited by Prof. A. C. Seward. (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1917.) Price 5s. net.

DR. NORMAN R. CAMPBELL (NATURE, August 8, p. 208) writes with a certain lack of charity about the numerous men of science, medical men, publicists, and so forth, who have ventured to inform themselves about birth control. To seek knowledge about the origin of species, he informs us, may be honest and honourable, but “knowledge concerning contraception is sought, either from mere prurience, or from intention to practise it or to teach others to do so”. But that is just what a Tennessee Fundamentalist would say about interest in evolution. He would say men wanted to know they were beasts in order to make beasts of themselves. It is impossible to let Dr. Campbell's sweeping indictment pass unchallenged. People in general want to know about this matter in order to judge it; they want to know the nature, the naturalness, the physical good or evil of these practices and what the mental and social reactions of this or that line of action may be. It is no more “prurient” to be intelligently interested in the question than in dietary. No one wants the publicly paid medical man to “propagate” this knowledge where it is not desired. But we do want to see him free to give it, cleanly and discreetly, to people who know already that it exists and who will, failing him, probably seek it in shameful and dangerous ways. We object to any sect or section of the community coming with threats of dismissal and injury between him and those who want to know. That is what is done at the present time. And while this is the case in Britain I decline to line up to sneer at the Fundamentalists of Tennessee.

MR. CRUMP (vide p. 56) though adopting a critical form and tone, really endorses the grounds of my suggestion that the Science and Art Department should dissever itself by an age limit from school science. He is inclined to be especially severe upon the defects of the Government examinations because they are controlled by scientific men, and to excuse the proper school examining boards because they have—according to Mr. Crump—attempted to examine in science without any qualification to do so. But I fail to see why eminent scientific men should be expected to be experts in elementary science teaching, any more than distinguished litterateurs, in the art of teaching to read, and it seems to me—in spite of Mr. Crump's “absolute” denial—that examining boards, neither professedly literary nor scientific but professedly educational, are more to blame in following and abetting the Department's premium upon text-book cramming. The fact remains that the London Matriculate ignores practical teaching of any kind, and that the “practical chemistry” of the Locals and College of Preceptors is essentially the same test-tube analysis as the South Kensington examination. Anyone who knows the London Matriculation examination—witness Miss Heath's concluding remark—will appreciate the quiet humour of Mr. Crump's allusion to it as “awakening and developing the powers of observation and reasoning.”

“T. B. S.” is quite right. I regret very much that I did not verify my quotation. A confusion of Og's bed and the lopping propensities of Adoni-Bezek seems to have decayed to the likeness of Procrustes. I have lived in this error for years. I have often used the image of King Og's bed in conversation and, I think, in published matter. No one has ever detected my slip, and it is by no means impossible that I am the centre of propagation of a mistake that will turn up again.

I DO not know how far the columns of NATURE are suitable for the discussion of “power” (in the human community). But when I find no less than three of the nine chief reviews in the issue for December 8 dealing with this question, and Dr. Snow and myself being scolded for “false methodology” and the want of a “robust” political faith, it is perhaps permissible to point out that the class-war dogma which underlies this sort of criticism has no scientific standing.

THE other day in the course of an automobile tour I visited the Mas d'Azil. I would like to direct the attention of the readers of NATURE, and particularly of those with money and organising power, to the very unsatisfactory state of affairs in this beautiful and incomparable treasure-house of archaeological material. Practically there is no control, no protection and no organised excavation whatever at Mas d'Azil. There are masses of valuable material, but none of it is being worked at properly. Much of it, I fear, is being wasted and muddled up. There is a ‘guide,’ a pleasant untrained man, who pokes about in the caves, digs out bones which, as he remarks, fall to pieces, and presents the casual visitor with teeth or flint implements he has found in his own researches. He has no regular salary. He has to supplement his fees and tips by other work. Occasionally, isolated individuals obtain permission from the municipality and prod in the rocks and extract this or that and publish their ‘results,’ according to their lights. There is a small useless museum without labels or arrangement at the Mairie. The financial situation forbids the hope of Government direction. The essential trouble seems to be the want of funds. From Mas d'Azil came some of the most beautiful and interesting objects in the admirably arranged museum in Toulouse; the carved horse head and other carvings and the painted pebbles from this site are well known. One would not need to go outside the scientific ability available in the region if money were forthcoming to mobilise it for the proper exploitation of these priceless deposits.