NOTE. Unless otherwise stated, all wave-lengths are upon Rowland's scale in air at about 20° C. and 760 mm. pressure. All oscillation frequencies are in vacuo.

The Production of Haloids from Pure Materials.-Report of a Committee, consisting of Professor H. E. ARMSTRONG, F.R.S., Professor WYNDHAM R. DUNSTAN, F.R.S., Mr. C. H. BOTHAMLEY, and Mr. W. A. SHENSTONE (Secretary).

THE work of the Committee has been actively continued during a considerable part of the past year.

The various preliminary difficulties involved in the preparation of pure materials, and especially of chlorine, have now been largely overcome, and it is anticipated that considerable progress will be made during the coming year in investigating the behaviour of highly purified chlorine, and the Committee ask to be reappointed for this purpose.

A considerable part of the grant made to meet expenses already incurred in 1894 remains in hand, and therefore it is not necessary to ask for a further grant this year.

How shall Agriculture best obtain the Help of Science? By R. WARINGTON, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Rural Economy, Oxford.

[Ordered by the General Committee to be printed in extenso.]

OUR discussion to-day will, I trust, have practical results. The time is certainly ripe for decided steps being taken. No doubt exists in the mind of any one that British agriculture is in great need of some powerful helping hand, which, in popular phraseology, shall put it on its legs again. There is probably also no doubt in the mind of any person in this room that, if the farmer is to be enabled to do his best, agriculture must be advanced from its original condition as an art, and that in future its operations must be conducted with the full assistance of natural science. The so-called 'practical man' may indeed believe that the question we have met to discuss will be at once set aside as profitless if we raise the preliminary question, Do you believe that the assistance of natural science will remove agricultural depression? I answer at once that I do not know that it will, but that this is no reason for declining the aid which science offers. When a sick man calls in a physician he does not ask the preliminary question, Do you promise to restore me to full health? If the question were asked, the physician would positively decline to make any such promise; and yet the sick man would place himself unreservedly in the physician's hands, feeling that he could not do better than make use of the best knowledge of the day on the subject of his complaint. Now agricultural science should mean the best knowledge of the day on the subject of agriculture, and a farmer will surely do wisely to obtain the aid of this knowledge in all his operations.

We have now to consider in what manner, by what methods, agriculture may best obtain the aid of science. We might divide our answer to this question into two parts. We might say, in the first place, that the science of agriculture is still only in its infancy, and that if agriculture is