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value of money, nor a faithful copy of the Soviet model, which has a greater diversity of institutions, and of procedures for saving and credit. It is above all thanks to its simplicity that the Chinese system has adjusted well to the modem economic situation. In a country where industry and the services contribute only a limited part of the GNP, the existence of numerous financial institutions or of rather elaborate techniques, like the cheque or negotiable bill, would probably be useless. A diversity of institutions or procedures would itself be contrary to the wish of the Chinese leadership to conduct a dynamic economic policy, in a very extensive territory and without external aid, where enterprises and households would to some extent act freely, possibly in opposition to the targets of the Plan. Finally, it seems that the Chinese monetary system has, since 1949, proved its own effectiveness. The control exerted on the liquidity level of enterprises and on the distribution of credit has, it seems, helped totally to eliminate speculation in commodities, notably foodstuffs, which characterized economic life before the accession of the Communist Party to power. Moreover, the maintenance of the purchasing power of the yiian which all observers agree in recognizing, and of which the Chinese press boast at each international monetary crisis, shows that the credit and savings policy has been conducted in a way entirely consistent with the policy of production and distribution of goods and with that of fixed prices.

The institutionalization of natural knowledge in the form of a scientific society may be interpreted in several ways. If we wish to view science as something apart, unchanging in its intellectual nature, we may regard the scientific enterprise as presenting to the sustaining social system a number of absolute and necessary organizational demands: for example, scientific activity requires acceptance as an important social activity valued for its own sake, that is, it requires autonomy; it is separate from other forms of enquiry and requires distinct institutional modes; it is public knowledge and requires a public, universalistic forum; it is productive of constant change and requires of the sustaining social system a flexibility in adapting to change. Support for such an interpretation may be found in the rise of modern science in seventeenth-century England, France, and Italy and in the accompanying rise of specifically scientific societies. Thus, the founding of the Royal Society of London may be interpreted as the organizational embodiment of immanent demands arising from scientific activity—the cashing of a blank cheque payable to science written on society's current account.

It is generally accepted that Ibn-Ḥawqal crossed the Sahara and visited Awdaghost in 951/2 to be the first Arab geographer who reached the gates of bilād al-Sūdān. This is inferred from what he says about a cheque he saw in Awdaghost. A critical analysis of the references to this cheque suggests that it was a bill of debt owed by a trader from Sijilmāsa resident at Awdaghost to another trader from Sijilmāsa. The transactions between the two were part of the trans-Saharan trade, with one partner resident at Awdaghost and the other at Sijilmāsa. The bill must have been held by the creditor, whom Ibn-Ḥawqal could have met at Sijilmāsa.It was from this man that Ibn-Ḥawqal recorded the information about the ruler of the Ṣanhāja in the southern Sahara, and probably also about his relations with Ghana and other Sudanese polities. Another valuable piece of information, about the abandoned route from Ghana to Egypt, was collected in the oases of Egypt. Also, the detailed list of Berber tribes inhabiting the area between Tadmekka and Air could have been obtained in North Africa, rather than at Awdaghost, because communications in the Sahara were more frequent between north and south than between west and east.Ibn-Ḥawqal's description of the Sahara is stereotypic and adds nothing to what earlier geographers had to say, and the same applies to his words concerning Awdaghost itself. Towns and kingdoms in the Sudan mentioned by Ibn-Ḥawqal had already been recorded earlier by al-Yaʻqūbī, Ibn al-Faqīh and al-Masʻūdī. For a traveller who crossed the Sahara, Ibn-Ḥawqal's information is rather poor, but if he collected his information north of the Sahara, as this paper suggests, his labours as an inquisitive geographer are praiseworthy.

On the day in November 1848 when the first volume of Macaulay's History of England appeared, Ludgate Hill was jammed with carriages struggling to get to Messrs. Longman in Paternoster Row. Three thousand copies were sold in ten days and the pace began to increase rather than slacken. The time came when Robert Longman pressed a cheque for £20,000 on Macaulay on the grounds that he had too much money in his own account. At a guinea a volume this was a prodigious achievement for Victorian times. Although Macaulay naturally thought well of his work, its public reception astonished even him. The reviews were almost uniformly as eulogistic as they were lengthy, but the book was far more than a success of metropolitan literary society. "At Duckinfield, near Manchester, a gentleman who thought that there would be a certain selfishness in keeping so great a pleasure to himself, invited his poorer neighbours to attend every evening after their work was finished, and read the History aloud to them from beginning to end. At the close of the last meeting, one of the audience rose, and moved, in north country fashion, a vote of thanks to Mr. Macaulay 'for having written a history which working men can understand.'" His success at Windsor was as great as at Manchester. The Prince Consort was so deeply impressed by his book that he immediately offered Macaulay the vacant chair of Modem History at Cambridge, which Macaulay immediately declined on the grounds that if he were to lecture well he would be forced to give up his History. And if he were to write the History, his lectures would be bad. Some years later, Queen Victoria recognized Macaulay's unique position in English life and letters by making him a peer—the first writer to achieve such a distinction.

The exact application of the theory of queues to ships' congestion at port is, if not impossible, very difficult, and may be too complicated to use. More practical way of approach may be an approximate expansion of that theory in limited accuracy.Wellknown result of Fig. 1 may be approximately corrected by the correction factors C1 & C2 given in Fig. 2 & 3. The effect of control of arrival time interval at port and service time at quay can be discussed by these factors. In sec. 5, 6 & 7, actual data of several Japanese ports are analised.So called the “Monte Carlo” Method can be benefitially applied to this problem. In sec. 8 examples of application are shown and used to cheque the accuracy of the above approximate method.

AMONG my mental photographs that despite the years remain distinct, even vivid, is one of a cheque for Ten Pounds, signed by Mr. John Lane, of the Bodley Head. It represented the agreed payment for a collection of verses embodied in a picture‐book for young people, the artist being Charles Robinson, and it was my first “honorarium” with the dignity of double figures.

The cash reserve feature of the banking systems of the United States, state as well as national, is peculiar to this country. Nowhere else is a fixed reserve required against deposits. The central banking institutions of Europe are commonly required to keep a contain minimum metallic reserve against their note issues, although there is a notable exception even to this in the case of the Bank of France, but in all foreign countries the question of a proper cash reserve against deposits is left to the discretion of the banker. The practices and regulations of foreign banking systems are all characterized by this comparative indifference to deposits and emphasis upon the importance of the note issues. On the continent of Europe this may be accounted for in part by the fact that deposit banking is yet undeveloped to any such degree as it is in England or the United States, and the private cheque has not yet taken the place of circulating notes, as it has done to a great extent in these two countries. The common medium of payments in Germany and France is the bank note, while in England and the United States it is the private cheque. The custom of keeping a bank account is much more common in these two countries than anywhere else in the world, and this of course accounts in part for our being more interested in the security for deposits while elsewhere the interest is in security for the circulating notes. But England, although like ourselves in the use of the bank account and cheque, is like the continental countries in its indifference to cash reserves for deposits. There, too, all emphasis is laid upon the convertibility of the bank note. So far is this true that when the constitution of the Bank of England was reformed in 1844 and provision was made that its issues above a certain amount must be fully covered by gold, the authors of the act seem to have thought the bank absolutely fortified against attack, although no provision had been made to meet a run by depositors. This weak(523)

It was only six years ago that C. J. Slade wrote his memorable article “The Myth of Mistake in the English Law of Contract” in which he placed the whole subject of mistake in a new and agreeable perspective. “Mistake as such,” he declared, “has no operative effect whatever at law.”This was good news for the student; but problems of error in persona still had to be solved, and for these Mr. Slade proposed a simple application of the basic principles of offer and acceptance. The test was whether A's offer was addressed to B and B's acceptance addressed to A, their intention being construed objectively unless that of the one was known to the other, in which case the actual intention of the former determined the matter. The authorities, for the most part, ranged themselves in substantial support, and rationality, it seemed, had been injected at last into this confused branch of the law.This reassurance has now been disturbed by the case of Ingram v. Little, which reminds us that the offer and acceptance test is no magic formula acting as a ready panacea for all the ills caused by error in persona.The facts which gave rise to Ingram v. Little are by now well known. Three ladies who wished to sell their car were offered an acceptable price by a stranger, but they made it plain they would not accept payment by cheque. He then pretended to them that he was a certain P. G. M. Hutchinson and quoted an address which the ladies found to be the one shown beside that person's name in the telephone directory.

A paper presented at the Society's Symposium, "Fraud and Questioned Documents", London, November 20, 1971. The hunt for the killer of Nicola Brazier is described in detail ; the handwriting on the "murder" cheque is analysed and its significance discussed.

New Zealand is primarily an agricultural country. Sixty per cent of all its production, including nearly 100% of its exports, comes from farms and is produced by only 17% of the total labour force. Within the agricultural industry sheep farming is dominant. Wool provides between one-third and one-half of the total exports and lamb and mutton about one-sixth. Over 90% of the wool and lamb produced and about 50% of the mutton is exported.The prominent place that wool occupies in New Zealand’s farming strikes any visitor from Britain. The wool cheque naturally exceeds the income from other sources on the sheep stations of the Southern Alps where Merino sheep are grazed, but on lower hill farms selling cast-for-age or surplus two-tooth ewes to fat-lamb breeding farms and store lambs to hogget fatteners the wool cheque is still usually more than half the income.

Fil: Forné, Agustín A.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Magnetic Ink Character Recognition (MICR) was developed about 10 years ago for the automation of cheque and transfer processing in banks and Postgiro’s. In the U.S.A. the E-13B type fount was developed and in Europe CMC-7; their general characteristic is eight characters per inch printing pitch, special printing equipment and a fairly high degree of print quality control. In continental Europe, MICR has not been applied extensively and there is a strong trend noticeable towards Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The primary reason for this is a ten character per inch printing pitch which allows for the use of regular printers, e.g. high-speed printers. It is felt that OCR can provide a better balance between document preparation and reading costs. The subject recognition system was developed specifically with this reasoning in mind. Details of this development are given below.

Copia digital. España : Ministerio de Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 2020

J. b. yeats was now in New York on a “visit” which had already lasted three years. Late in 1907, after having been presented with a cheque by Hugh Lane, Andrew Jameson and other Dublin friends who wished to show their appreciation of a wonderful personality and their sense of what art in Ireland owed to the old painter, he had chosen to cross the Atlantic with his daughter Lily, who was giving an exhibition of her Dun Emer embroideries in New York, rather than visit Italian galleries, as had originally been proposed. Such was his interest in the American scene and such his delight in the reception accorded him by John Quinn — “the crossest man in the world and the kindest” — and by Quinn’s friends, that when the time came for his daughter to return he could not make up his mind to board the boat with her. To leave New York, he said, would be to leave a huge fair where at any moment he might meet with a huge bit of luck. Moreover, he had at last found a place where people did not eat too much at dinner to talk afterwards.

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Fil: Speroni, César M.. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

This chapter discusses miscellaneous accounts. A bill of exchange is a written order to pay a given sum of money at a stated time. The most common bills of exchange are cheques. A cheque is an order to a banker to pay money. Another special type of bill is the accommodation bill. A bill is accepted by a drawee even though the drawee is not indebted to the drawer. The purpose is to allow the drawer to discount the bill and obtain liquid funds. The acceptor has not received value for the bill but is liable to any holder. The drawer must provide him with the funds required to meet the bill at its due date. The date for payment is specified. Failure to discharge a bill on the due date is much more damaging to a person's reputation than postponing payment of a credit account.

Fil: Sautú, Félix Alberto de. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Murioni, Oscar. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Rosso, Oscar Vicente. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Bavio, Bartolomé Horacio. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Gigliotti, Cayetano Agustín. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Grondona, Hugo Juan José. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Verrier, César Raúl. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Vives, María Teresa Esperanza. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Fil: Carbonell Tur, Antonio. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Económicas. Buenos Aires, Argentina.

MY first long talk with Sir Alfred Yarrow was at Oxford in 1926, during the British Association meeting. Yarrow was at that time much interested in the relation between the world's output of gold and the cost of living index figure. A year later he read a paper on the subject at the British Association meeting at Leeds. I knew little of the matter, but I listened to him with interest. Later on, at Brighton, we discussed the future of scientific societies and technical institutions, and particularly the relative merits of short term donations and endowments for perpetuity. It was a most interesting talk, and we agreed that only in exceptional circumstances were perpetuity endowments wise, and that it was better for capital and interest on donations to be spent within twenty years or so. and to leave subsequent generations to do their bit. Yarrow thereupon told me he proposed giving me £5000 for the British Association, the capital and interest on which were to be spent within twenty years. I asked him not to spoil a very pleasant evening by putting me in the position of a beggar, and suggested the donation could wait. He agreed, but shortly after midnight he wrote out a cheque, and handing it to me, said, “I have doubled it—there is £10,000”.

When the Fraudulent Cheque File was organized in this laboratory in 1959, checks were filed under such headings as modus operandi, company names, suspects' names, dates of birth, and aliases, as well as headings related to the actual composition of the check—typewriting, checkwriting, etc. Only when search under these headings was successful could a handwriting comparison be made.

I USE the word control throughout this paper in an exact and rather narrow sense. By a control I intend a means of comparing any state, actual or hypothetical, with a standard. The building contractor plots on charts against time the projected course of many interdependent operations; and against these courses he plots, week by week, the progress actually achieved. Thus he is able continually to compare what is with what ought to be; and this is the essence of control. Some of the standards which the contractor plots are limits which must not be transgressed. Others will give cause for concern if the actual diverges from the standard in either direction. It does not matter, for example, how quickly planning permission is obtained, so long as it is obtained before he wants to begin to build; but it does matter if one phase of building is completed so much ahead of time that the labour cannot be at once deployed on the next phase. The first type of control I refer to as negative control and I call the standard a limit. The second I reVer to as positive control and I call the standard a norm. When performance transgresses a limit or diverges from a norm, the damage which ensues varies with the amount of the divergence but not in any constant way. Within certain limits it may be negligible. Thereafter, the damage may be acute at first and may then accrue more slowly; or (more usually) it may accrue at an accelerating rate. In either case, there is likely to come a point beyond which dramatic and irreversible changes occur. For example, shortage of cash causes progressive embarrassment, as it becomes more acute; but if it reaches the point at which the bank refuses to meet the weekly wages cheque, its effect suddenly overflows and brings the whole operation to a standstill. Beyond each limit and on either side of each norm there usually exist points such as this, which cannot be passed without effecting radical and irreversible change. These points of no return I call thresholds. I invite you then to regard a business and the processes which compose it as a system of variables, which can maintain itself only so long as the values and mutual relations of the variables are kept within certain thresholds. Within these limits management at all levels operates. When management can compare what is happening

Digital computers have become so much a part of our modern existence that one can hardly write a cheque or buy a cream cake without standing a good chance of causing a few pulses to reverberate around a mass of electronics. Computer use in data processing is very high and increasing at a fantastic rate, but only a relatively small proportion of engineering analysis and development is aided in this way. There are many complex reasons for this apparent limited use, but the overriding inhibiting factor is the poor availability of convenient engineering-oriented machines.

IT would appear that radium has landed geologists and biologists in a difficulty greater than that from which it was hoped it would deliver them. There is radium in the earth, and radium in disintegrating gives out heat. Therefore a once molten globe will cool down more slowly than if it contained no such independent source of heat. Lord Kelvin's calculations were made on the supposition that there was no source of heat except what the earth possessed as a molten globe. Hence we are at liberty to extend the time that has elapsed since the earth became the possible theatre of geological change to 500,000,000, 1,000,000,000, or even more, years ago. Radium has given us a blank cheque on the bank of time.

This is a timely book. Professor Triffin, whose ideas were largely responsible for the shape of E.P.U., is a foremost authority on his subject. He writes with lucidity and persuasiveness. He has not only much practical experience of negotiations over a number of years, but also a rich knowledge of monetary history, such as is found in only a few contemporary writers. He is a fine theorist, and at the same time has a very good sense of how abstract doctrine should be resolved into practical proposals. In his main theme he is, according to my view, on the side of the angels: he holds a sufficient provision of international liquidity to be of prime importance. And he has no difficulty in showing that the present provision is inadequate and, over the coming years, will grow more so. In his wide-ranging discussions of monetary philosophy and in his historical retrospects, there is much that might call for comment. But it seems expedient in the space available to concentrate upon his constructive plan for increasing liquidity. His proposal is to transform the International Monetary Fund into being in effect a world central bank ; this is linked with a plan for terminating the use of the dollar and sterling as international currencies. Member countries would hold part of their reserves in the form of deposits with the I.M.F., drawable on by cheque, the deposits to be acquired in the first instance by the transfer of existing assets from the central banks to the I.M.F. These deposits would subsequently be increased by lending and open-market operations undertaken on a rising scale by the I.M.F., and designed to increase world liquidity in the aggregate (i.e. including gold accessions) by 3 per cent. (or 4 per cent. or 5 per cent.) a year. First, it is needful to deal with certain technical aspects of this plan. It is to be feared that it would not give so substantial an increase in liquidity as Professor Triffin appears to claim for it. 1. Initially there might be a rather large loss of liquidity. Central Banks are to surrender certain liquid assets that they now have, mainly foreign exchange and gold, in return for deposits of equal amount with the reconstructed International Monetary Fund. Central Banks are to be required to maintain 20 per cent. of their gross reserves in the form of deposits with the I.M.F. These deposits can be used to discharge international indebtedness, but are to be maintained at 20 per cent. of gross reserves. This requirement must be deemed to ' Gold and the Dollar Crisis, by Robert Triffin. Yale University Press, 1960. pp. xiv +195. 38s.