No. 38:>3, SEPTEMBER 19, 1942 NATURE 341 The coefficients given by the first approximation, German language, and partly because they covered with their standard errors, were a 22 = 4 · 8± 1 · 3 ; the geological globe in a well-balanced conspectus aa 1 =6·2±2·3; a 32 =2·0±0·6, none of the others supported by a background of documented facts. being as great as their standard errors. For a second He was particularly attracted to Britain, where his solution he included a 00 and also a 20 (the main ellip­ father was born, and visited the Highlands more ticity term) and solved for the five coefficients by than once to compare their architecture with that of least squares. The result was : a 22 = 4 ·0 ± 1 ·4 ; a 32 = the Caledonian masses he knew so thoroughly near l ·3 ±0·7; a 31 =4·2 ±2·4; a00=2·5 ±1 ·9; a 20 = -6·1 ± the Danube. He contributed papers in English on 5 ·O ; and the co3:ncient b33 then had the value of the thorny problems of the structures of the Scottish 0·46 ±0·26. The coefficient a 22 indicates that the Highlands, and they provide a welcome variety in a 'ellipticity of the equator' is genuine, but that the rather mystic literature. uncertainty is greater than that given by Heiskanen. Though somewhat crippled in'later years, Suess was Compensated inequalities that would account for surprisingly active, and in pursuit of his science he the harmonics au, a 32, a 31 and baa would be of ampli­ would walk long days amidst the woods of the tudes 5·2, l ·9, l ·9, 2·2 km. respectively. Now Prey Wiener Wald or on his own particular ground not computed in 1922 coefficients which give the repre­ far from the Danube, over the Scottish moors in sentation of the earth's figure by spherical harmonics their less pleasant moods, or brave the winter frosts up to degree 16, and from his results it follows that of the Bushveldt and sleep with only a cloak between there is practically no relation between mean height him and the stars at an age when such expeditions and gravity anomaly for inequalities with horizontal would dismay most men. ranges of about 30°. Thus, the hypothesis of com­ Suess was an LL.D. of the University of Glasgow plete compensation must be abandoned. To explain and had a large circle of friends in Great Britain. the distribution of gravity an internal interface seems He had a discriminating taste in art and music, in to be required, the height of which has a negative both of which he was no mean performer. The former correlation with that of the outer surface. We have, rendered his field notebooks models of their kind as in fact, strong evidence that isostasy is not exact, his skilful, truthful pen recorded pictorial evidence and are led to something of the type of Glennie's unbiased by theoretical distortion and furnished 'crustal warping'. The value of the reciprocal of the illustrations of field facts in a way that few can hope ellipticity of the earth derived from this investigation to do even with the aid of a camera. In the latter, is 296 ·17, with a standard error of 0·68. his piano was near his study and upon it he would R. STONELEY. discourse in a most versatile fashion. Like many an Austrian he loved Mozart and Schubert, Beethoven and Wagner,. but besides he was tremendously attracted by the unexpected harmonies of Richard OBITUARIES Strauss. He had an unusual knowledge and apprecia­ tion of the whimsicalities of Gilbert and Sullivan. He Prof. F. E. Suess attracted around him a large circle of students and NEWS has been received recently that Prof. Franz friends who used to meet once a week in one of the Eduard Suess, emeritus professor of geology in the parks near the Danube during each summer. To University of Vienna, the son of Eduard Suess, died those who knew him he was ever genial and as a man in Austria about a year ago, aged seventy-four. After hospitable to a fault. many years on the Austrian Geological Survey, he J. V. HARRISON. occupied several academic posts before his appoint­ ment to the chair in Vienna in 1911. As an enthusiastic pupil of Becke, he was one of the first to make use Mr. E. A. Nahum of the petrology of metamorphism to interpret the MR. E. A. Nahum, a research worker in the Caven­ history of rocks, a method he applied in grappling dish Laboratory, was killed in Cambridge during a with problems of the crystalline massif of Moldanubia recent air raid. and studies of the deeper parts of mountain ranges Nahum, who belonged to a Manchester family, where intrusions play an important pa.rt, Later, he was educated at Clifton College and at Pembroke integrated his opinions by enunciating a theory of College, Cambridge, to which he went with an Open mountain building through loading caused by the Exhibition in 1936. He read for the Natural Sciences carriage of a moving 'creative mass' over a passive Tripos and obtained a first class in Part I and in foreland. The ranges as they exist to-day result from Part II (Physics). He returned to Cambridge with the erosion of this structure. Fragments of the load a Goldsmith senior studentship in 1940 and began left by chance can be distinguished from the loaded work on the cyclotron. The Cambridge cyclotron under-ground by the different grade of metamorphism had not long been installed, and as most of the senior they display, and a passage can be traced from the nuclear physicists were away, it says much for the loaded to the unloaded part of the old foreland. It young research workers that they not only kept it in follows that the occurrence of a mass of crystalline running order but also obtained material for four schists in a mountain system is no evidence that they very comprehensive papers on the deuteron bom­ are older than fossiliferous sediments not far away bardment of the heavy elements. In the last two of in the unloaded region. Indeed, the sedimentary rocks these, with R. S. Krishnan, which appeared in a in the' creative mass' may be as old as the schists and very recent number of the Proceeding8 of the Royal gneisses formed below them. He regarded the Society, the first quantitative measurements were Caledonian and Variscan ranges of Europe, Asia and made of the reaction yields, which made possible America as types of this orogenesis. detailed comparison of experiment with results Suess was less prolific than his father, but he dis­ predicted by the present theory of the interactions played an enviable erudition in contributions to a host of deuterons with heavy nuclei. of geological subjects. His lectures in Vienna were Nahum was known to many as a young scientific popular, partly on account of his masterly use of the worker of great promise, but students throughout © 1942 Nature Publishing Group.