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Kelvin had been a staunch Liberal until Gladstone's Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886 made him a Liberal Unionist. He believed the measure would damage Ireland's best interests and would create economic and social instability. He also rejected it on constitutional grounds. Concern for the position of Ulster's Protestants was, however, not a major issue for Kelvin. Between 1886 and 1890 he was the most prominent Liberal Unionist in the West of Scotland, and under his leadership, the party was highly effective in the region. It is likely that, to a certain extent, his peerage was a reward for his political work. After 1890, Kelvin became more of a party figurehead, while his views on many political issues drew him closer to those of the Conservatives.

Next week 200 of Britain's oral and maxillofacial surgeons will visit secondary schools to warn pupils about the risks of facial injury from drinking and fighting and, with the help of patients, to show them the consequences of such injuries. What are those risks, and how may they be prevented? In few places is the effectiveness of legislation on seat belts and drinking and driving more obvious than in oral and maxillofacial trauma. From 1977 to 1987 the proportion of patients with maxillofacial fractures sustained in road accidents fell by 34%,1 and rates of facial bone fracture sustained in road accidents fell from 6.2 to 4.1 per 100 000 population. Violent crime, however, more than compensated for this decrease, and, although the incidence of serious injury such as complex pan-facial fractures decreased, the overall incidence of facial injury rose from 20 to 24 per 100 000 population.1 The proportion of injuries sustained in assaults increased from 40% in 1977 …

The conventional inferior alveolar nerve block is sometimes ineffective for certain clinical and anatomical reasons. As a result, alternative methods have been suggested. This double-blind study compared the effectiveness of the Akinosi technique and conventional mandibular block injection techniques in 250 patients. It was concluded that the conventional or direct technique was more effective in achieving inferior alveolar nerve anaesthesia.

EDITOR,—Doctors are obliged to obtain signed consent from patients to take their clinical photographs. Guidelines to authors of scientific papers require patients' signed consent to the publication of clinical photographs when the patients are recognisable.1 2 It seems, however, that the press can take photographs …

Summary. The estimation of environmental effects forms an important part of the interpretation of oceanic heat flow measurements. In particular, the perturbations associated with sedimentation and surface temperature changes must be taken into account. Analytical solutions can be obtained only for individual, simplified versions of these problems, whereas any real example is complicated by the process of sediment compaction which changes the bulk thermal properties with depth. A physical model is developed which uses sediment porosity trends to predict the thermal parameters and material advection rates for an evolving sediment/basement system. These values are then used in a numerical solution to the heat flow equation to give estimates of the perturbed surface heat flux through time. In addition to variations in sedimentation rate, sediment type, radioactive heat production and surface temperature changes are considered. Heat flow corrections may vary by up to a factor of 2 according to sediment type while radioactive heat production can offset the effects of sedimentation by as much as 40 per cent. The results also indicate that alterations determined from simple analytical models tend to over-estimate the true perturbation to the flux.