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DR. ELFREIDA C. V. MATTICK (nee Cornish) died in Reading on July 19, 1943. She was educated at Colston's School, Bristol, and took her qualifying degrees at the University of Bristol, working with Prof. J. W. McBain on a thesis dealing with the colloidal properties of soap solutions. She later took her doctorate at the same University. But she will best be remembered for her very long association with the National Institute for Research in Dairying at Shinfield, where she took up work on a Ministry of Agriculture Scholarship in 1913. For thirty years, but for a few months, she worked at Shinfield ; in earlier years with Dr. Stenhouse Williams and Mr. J. Golding on the effects of heat treatment on the nutritive value of milk and later on the chemical changes taking place in the ripening of cheese, on the fat-splitting enzymes present in milk and milk products, on vegetable sources of rennet and on many other chemical and biochemical problems of practical importance in dairying.

THE recent illegal slaughter of grey seals in the supposed interests of the Cornish fishermen directs attention to the diet of seals. On what do they usually feed? On fish, as the fishermen and their friends assert, or on some of the other creatures which abound in the waters of the ocean?

For many years the Cornish Elm was known as Ulmus stricta Lindl., but on examining the elms of the Dumortier Herbarium in 1951 (Bull. Jard. Bot. Brux. 21, 351: 1951) I discovered that U. reticulata Dumort. was another and earlier name for this species. It was published in Dumortier's 'Florula Belgica' of 1827 and the type specimen consists of a fairly vigorous shoot such as might be picked from a sapling. The reticulate markings on the lower surfaces of the leaves, which appear to have suggested the name to Dumortier, are the result of feeding by insects. It is not certain how the specimen came into Dumortier's hands, but probably from a correspondent in this country.

DR. MELVILLE HOCKEN told me, at his hospitable dinner-table IN 1946, that he was born at Cardiff on January 10,1888, when his parents were cruising off the Weleh coast—not in Cornwall, as has been ststed elsewhere. He lived with his father, a Thames pilot ,at Gravesend from the age of four to sixteen, during which years he discovered mole crickets in Kent and evinced an innate bent for biology, fostered by Moseley's 1892 Challenger voyage, received as a school prize in 1903. His first medical appointment was at the East Suffolk and Ipswich Hospital. In 1914 he joined the R.A.M.C. as senior medical officer at the Martlesham Experimental Station near Ipswich, and later served at Filby on the Norfolk Broads. In 1920, after a short time in Ipswich (like Thomas Muffet in 1585), he moved to the little Suffolk town of Halesworth, where he later bought Adams's commodious brewery house, with its excellent Charles I staircase of applique work. Practice so thrived that in 1938 he took two partners ; and always another and very true one was his wife, Miss Winifred Triniman, a Cornish farmer's daughter.

This is a highly vitreous transparent reddish brown mineral, which occurs with quartz and rhodocrosite. Its H. is 3.5, and sp. gr. only 2.49.When heated in a tube closed at one end it gives off water, but is otherwise unchanged. More strongly heated in platinum forceps it loses colour and very slightly fuses on the edges.It is brittle, and has a highly conchoidal fracture. When digested with hydrochloric acid, oxide of manganese is dissolved out, and the silica which remains is perfectly colourless.