Letter: Albert's gall
I was pleased to see Gareth Williams’s trenchant criticism of the ‘pre-embryo’
theory (Letters, 20 January). I object, however, to the cartoon in the same
issue (Albert the Experimental Rat) unfairly depicting most pro-life activists
as supporters of capital punishment.
Undoubtedly there are a few like that, which is hardly surprising in
a country where the death penalty has widespread support in the general
population. But most of the pro-life leaders I have met are as strongly
opposed to capital punishment as any self-styled liberal.
Most European countries with capital punishment – including East Germany,
Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Soviet Union – also have permissive abortion
laws. By contrast, Ireland has neither capital punishment nor abortion;
and West Germany, which long ago abolished capital punishment, has constitutional
restrictions on abortion.
With a change of captions, Albert could have exposed the real inconsistency:
the inconsistency of opposing capital punishment for the guilty while defending
the killing of the innocent.
Philip L. Cooper Torquay
Letter: Horsetail's tale
Interesting though Stephen Young’s article on horsetails was, he has
been led up his garden path regarding their ability to accumulate gold (Forum,
6 January). This persistent myth originated in 1936 when more than 600 parts
per million of gold was reported in (ashed) horsetails from a Slovakian
gold field. It was a result of naive analysis: all the metallic sulphide
precipitated from the solute was reported as gold.
The same technique gave similar results on samples from other gold fields.
The myth was entrenched by spectrography, where the weak 443- and 479-nanometre
lines were used because the stronger 267-nanometre gold line was absent.
Robert Brooks summarises all this in Biological Methods of Prospecting for
Minerals (Wiley Interscience, 1984). Later workers using better methods
detected at most 1 part per million of gold in horsetails from gold areas,
and usually very much less, but found appreciable amounts of arsenic, zinc
and other metals.
That specific plants accumulate specific metals is a recognised aid
to prospecting. For example, ‘loco weed’ (a poisonous vetch which thrives
on selenium) occurs with 80 per cent of the selenium-bearing uranium ores
of the Colorado Plateau. Many other plants thrive in ore fields. In his
book Brooks lists more than 40 copper-loving species alone. Some plants
have played significant roles in ore discovery. However, I am afraid that
Equisetum is a nonstarter in the golden horsetail stakes.
J. W. Barnes Swansea
Letter: Origins of incense
I was fascinated by Colin Michie’s article about oriental incense in
your Christmas issue (‘Pharmaceutical magic from the Magi’, 23/30 December).
However, I find some of his etymology rather suspect.
Michie says that ‘by the first century AD, people were calling the milky
white resin that is frankincense olibanum, from the Arabic ‘liban’, for
milk’. However, people were calling this perfume ‘levonah’ at least half
a millennium earlier, and probably long before that. This Hebrew word occurs
in the Song of Solomon, paired with myrrh (mor in Hebrew). Not only that,
but the root ‘lavan’ means ‘white’ in Hebrew, and occurs in Scripture eight
centuries or more before the dates mentioned by Michie. For example, Isaiah
(Chapter 1, verse 33) refers to ‘your sins . . . will be washed as white
as snow’ (yalbinou).
John Kinory London W7
Letter: Green Christmas
I assume Ariadne bought a large tree for Christmas (13 January). How
silly.
We bought a small, potted tree five years ago. It takes centre stage
each Christmas and lives outside for the other 353 days of the year. The
tree is in a bigger pot now and our son knows it’s ‘not like granny’s’ because
it grows, lives, keeps its needles and doesn’t suddenly disappear when Christmas
is over.
As far as Christmas trees are concerned, not using a living thing for
decoration has no virtue whatsoever.
Mike Dobson London SW17
Letter: Which donkey?
Hazel Mackenzie excuses herself from facts out of the Bible when she
blames her friend for querying Mary’s riding on a donkey (Forum, 23/30 December).
However, a good New 杏吧原创 should check her facts first, and this could
have saved her a lot of work, and me a lot of sinful indignation at Christmas.
Nowhere does the Bible say that Mary or anyone rode to Bethlehem on a donkey.
Revd David Garner Halesowen, West Midlands
Letter: Ceausescu's fellowship
Richard Clogg has written a thoughtful piece on Elena Ceausescu’s visit
to the United Kingdom in 1978 (‘Let us now praise a famous woman’, Forum,
20 January).
The Royal Institute of Chemistry, in 1978, was asked to consider an
application from Elena Ceausescu for fellowship of the institute. The application
was supported by a long list of papers, published in her name over a period
from 1961 to 1972.
The application was treated, as was any other application, by submission
to a committee which, on the evidence presented, agreed that she merited
admission to fellowship of the institute. The fellowship was presented at
a ceremony no grander than would have been arranged for any other spouse
of a head of state.
When our disciplinary machinery has been followed through, it takes
a resolution, based on a vote of the society’s council, to remove a person’s
name from the register of members. The machinery was invoked on Wednesday
20 December (two days before Nicolae Ceausescu’s honorary knighthood was
removed) but was overtaken by events.
There is much talk at the moment about the extent of Elena Ceausescu’s
academic qualifications. There was no talk in 1978, nor has there been (to
our ears) until recently. If, in the final analysis, it turns out that the
qualifications were deficient, we have to say that hindsight always provides
us – individuals or institutions – with 20/20 vision.
B. A. Henman Registrar Royal Society of Chemistry London W1
Letter: Sounds of music
In his article ‘Geography and human song’ (20 January), Graham Pont
describes the work of his group which was triggered by my discovery of the
surprising conformity in composers’ order of choice for the nine possible
pitch profile starting patterns of themes (‘Are composers copycats?’, 24
March 1977), and he ascribes importance to that discovery. But it has only
become important by virtue of Pont’s own laborious and perceptive work.
He has turned Parsons’ law from a musical curiosity into a working tool
which he has already used to derive fascinating geographical comparisons
in melody, and he has encouraged further research on my part.
I have a minor clarification to make on his analysis of Scottish Gaelic
songs and Romanian folk music; these deviate from Parsons’ law, not because
they are respectively Scottish or Romanian, but because they are sung melodies.
The setting of words to music prompts composers to use repeated notes –
a typical example is ‘Your tiny hand is frozen’ from Puccini’s La Boheme.
The law was derived from a study of some 10 000 classical themes, predominantly
instrumental, recorded in my Directory of Tunes; the directory includes
the best-known operatic themes of Puccini, Verdi and Sullivan, and their
excess of repeated notes constitutes a specific deviation from the law.
But the order of choice for starting profiles for Scottish Gaelic songs
shown in Pont’s diagram is closely mirrored by the shapes of diagrams I
prepared for the three operatic composers, the common features being peaks
on the *UP UP and *REPEAT REPEAT profiles.
Pont’s work, however, clearly establishes, inter alia, the radical difference
between choice order of starting profiles of European sung themes and the
songs of American Indians and Australian Aborigines.
Denys Parsons London N6
Letter: Black humour
In his interesting article ‘The neurologist of Avon’ (20 January), Lance
Fogan discusses the references to neurological disease in Shakespeare’s
work. He states ‘The vitreous humour is a black gelatinous matter which
fills the eyeball – but how many lay people know this today?’
I hope the answer is very few.
Healthy vitreous transmits more than 90 per cent of visible light and,
therefore, is almost clear. If it were not, light would be unable to reach
the retina. The choroid and retinal pigment epithelium contain melanin but
this is not normally found in the vitreous cavity.
Perhaps, if Fogan were correct, Shakespeare would have had Cornwall
exclaiming: ‘Out vile blackcurrant jelly!’
David Laws Registrar in Ophthalmology Birmingham and Midland Eye Hospital
Letter: Audio mirrors
Barry Fox hinted at the similarity between my European patent application
and the renowned Gilbert Briggs concentric audio mirror loudspeakers (‘Canon
to left and right’, Technology, 23/30 December). In fact, it is not the
first time that I have encountered the fact that Briggs pioneered audio
mirror technology, to which my application owed much.
Raymond E. Cooke, founder of KEF Electronics and one of the outstanding
successors to Briggs, mentioned his work when I explained my idea. John
Borwick, editor of Loudspeaker and Headphone Handbook (Butterworths) referred
to Briggs’s idea in the article which appeared on page 506 in Gramophone,
September 1988. These two prominent people in British audio seemed to be
in agreement that there was a fundamental difference between the two.
Borwick said in his article: ‘But the special feature, which is so simple
that one wonders why it was not proposed long ago, is that the drive units
are set off-centre (slightly in front) of the reflector axis.’
Another important aspect of my idea is that the wide-imaging stereo
(WIS) is a purpose-made audio mirror loudspeaker for stereophony, which
Gilbert Briggs’s was not.
Since the mirror is originally from the optical world to which Canon
belongs, my idea was based on the analogy between audio and optics. The
difference between audio and optics is the wavelength as well as the perception
of physical energy by a human. The former presents difficulties in controlling
low to mid frequencies because of their long wavelengths; with the latter
I was helped by the famous precedent effect known as the Haas effect.
The main purpose of the idea is to combine the off-centred conical mirror
to tailor the polar directivity in order to achieve time-intensity trading
correctly for off-centred listeners who normally suffer severe distortion
of the stereo image. At least, the difference between conventional stereo
loudspeakers and WIS is greater than the difference of loudspeaker cables
mentioned by Feedback in your issue of 6 January.
Hiro Negishi Epsom, Surrey
Letter: Control of medicines
I enjoyed Sylvan Katz’s article ‘Roses are black, violets are green’
(Forum, 6 January). However, I was concerned at the suggestion that ‘biohackers’
could obtain antibiotics and hormones from veterinary outlets. In Britain
such drugs are available only for treatment of animals known to the prescribing
veterinary surgeon, and are not given out on request, as suggested in the
article.
There is, at present, pressure to move control of presciption-only medicines
(POMs) away from veterinary practitioners solely into the hands of pharmacists.
This would lead to a large increase in the total cost of veterinary care,
and possibly sever important links between the profession and agriculture,
to the ultimate detriment of animal health and welfare.
To allow suggestions, such as those made in your article, to pass uncorrected
could lose veterinary surgeons the legal trust which they currently have,
and consequently the important battle for control of POMs for animals.
Neil Coode Cranleigh, Surrey