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For upwards of a century the Mother of Parliaments has pioneered social and particularly public health legislation all over the world. The parliamentary democracies planted by Mother England in forty new Englands beyond the seas followed our lead. We have grown accustomed to this and it is now something of a shock to find this is no longer completely true. Except perhaps in housing, we do not lead in this field, but seem to be following. It was always said of the law “You cannot legislate in advance of public opinion!” In the control of food purity and quality, public opinion cannot be the arbiter and for it, there has to be substituted research, technology and scientific knowledge. During recent years, this country has tended to follow the U.S.A. in food control legislation; at least that part of it which deals with chemical treatment and food additives. This casts no reflection on the advances made in Britain, but these are neither adequate nor fast enough to keep abreast of the food technological explosion. The vast research programmes in the U.S.A., are better able to do this; their complaint is not of the shortage of money, only of brains. In the taxed‐to‐death, economic wilderness that is now Britain, we have the brains, but no money. It is hardly surprising that those with brains should seek in foreign fields the rewards and appreciation to which they are entitled.

The manufacturer who produces superior products is continually being confronted with the problem of how he can carry conviction to potential purchasers as to the superior quality of his products—a problem which is becoming increasingly difficult. In the present day something stronger than personal asseverations by a firm is required, in order to carry conviction, and independent scientific corroboration as to the quality of a product affords the only solution. The System of Independent Analytical Control and Approval was instituted in this country nearly forty years ago by the British Analytical Control, and the Gold Seal of Approval issued by the British Analytical Control is intended to afford authentic independent evidence in regard to the quality of a product, since it indicates that any product to which it has been affixed is Approved and periodically examined by an independent Scientific Staff consisting of well‐known Public Analysts. The System enables manufacturers and vendors of pure and high‐class products to submit those products to scientific examination, permanently applied, and carried out by an independent Consulting Scientific Staff of the highest standing. The approved products are thus placed before the public with authentic testimony as to their quality. A firm desiring to place an article with the British Analytical Control, Ltd., submits three samples of the article for scientific examination. The samples must be submitted in the unopened original packages, which must be properly labelled and securely sealed. If the results of the scientific examinations show that the composition and characters of the article are such as to justify the conclusion that it is pure, genuine and good in the strictest sense of those terms, the article is approved. A Certificate of Approval is issued upon those products or articles which are approved by the British Analytical Control, and the manufacturers or proprietors of such articles are entitled to use the Gold Seal, Official Label and Certificate of the British Analytical Control in connection with the products so approved. The officers of the British Analytical Control, Ltd., at irregular intervals procure samples of the articles upon which a certificate of approval has been issued, for scientific examination and for the purpose of comparison with the original samples.

The season of mass holiday treks for the multitude is upon us. Since the new year, the newspapers and magazines have carried pages of advertisements and travelogues and each year the holiday horizon is pushed farther and farther away; now it includes Bulgaria, Rumania, remote islands, countries beyond the Iron Curtain and even China. Tourism has become big business. In the U.K., with a million or more visitors, it is considered a major industry. But what of Italy with eight million visitors, Spain running her very close, France with a mere two millions, Switzerland, Austria and other countries in between? All these countries may be geared to meet big invasions of foreign people during the tourist season, but understandably there are inevitable health risks and the most important of these are undoubtedly water‐ and food‐borne infections. Dietary disturbances due to the change of food and drink, especially of wine, by people who are unaccustomed to it, are of a transitory nature, and remedied by simple measures which include abstinence from rich and indigestible foods.

The London County Council has now passed into history. Often accused of being an overloaded bureaucracy, which it probably was, and a stage for demagogues, of political bias and Socialist waste, it may go unmourned by many, but because of its great influence on local government development in this country and its achievements, it should not be allowed to go unsung. When created by the Local Government Act, 1888, from parts of the counties of Middlesex, Surrey and Kent, it must have seemed at the time something of an administrative anachronism, just as the welding of the remnants of power of the Council with that of Middlesex into a Greater London Council seems so now. Its powers were much greater than those of other county councils and its relations with metropolitan borough councils, constituted by the Local Government Act, 1899, more powerful, the division of functions and authority strongly favouring the L.C.C., especially since 1948 when the National Health Service Act, 1946, transferred the personal health services from the Boroughs. Decentralisation was practised, the area of the L.C.C. being divided into nine divisions, but Greater London long ago outgrew its administrative boundaries, outside which were densely populated areas indistinguishable from London itself, so that re‐organisation was inevitable.

Information transfer among scientists can be regarded as analoguous to a complex rate process highly dependent on the characteristics of the information forms. A general model is presented and an attempt made to quantify certain pathways. Time values are presented for the major stages and certain transmission losses, arising from the condensation of information as it passes from primary to secondary sources, have been calculated. In particular the roles of theses, alerting services and reviews are discussed. A significant fraction of chemical information appears in a thesis before it is republished in a journal paper.

The final report of the Butter Regulations Committee has now been published and it is earnestly to be hoped that Regulations based on the Committee's Recommendations will at once be framed and issued by the Board of Agriculture. It will be remembered that in an Interim Report the Committee recommended the adoption of a limit of 16 per cent. for the proportion of water in butter, and that, acting on this recommendation, the Board of Agriculture drew up and issued the “Sale of Butter Regulations, 1902,” under the powers conferred on the Board by Section 4 of the Food Act of 1899. In the present Report the Committee deal with the other matters referred to them, namely, as to what Regulations, if any, might with advantage be made for determining what deficiency in any of the normal constituents of butter, or what addition of extraneous matter other than water, should raise a presumption until the contrary is proved that the butter is not “genuine.” The Committee are to be congratulated on the result of their labours—labours which have obviously been both arduous and lengthy. The questions which have had to be dealt with are intricate and difficult, and they are, moreover, of a highly technical nature. The Committee have evidently worked with the earnest desire to arrive at conclusions which, when applied, would afford as great a measure of protection—as it is possible to give by means of legislative enactments—to the consumer and to the honest producer. The thorough investigation which has been made could result only in the conclusions at which the Committee have arrived, namely, that, in regard to the administration of the Food Acts, (1) an analytical limit should be imposed which limit should determine what degree of deficiency in those constituents which specially characterise butter should raise a presumption that the butter is not “genuine”; (2) that the use of 10 per cent. of a chemically‐recognisable oil in the manufacture of margarine be made compulsory; (3) that steps should be taken to obtain international co‐operation; and finally, that the System of Control, as explained by various witnesses, commends itself to the Committee.

Before one looks at services intended to make one aware of current progress in science, one should look briefly at the structure of science and at how, and perhaps why, information is generated. It has long been an administrative convenience to divide science into a number of quite well‐defined fields such as biology, physics, chemistry, etc., and to further subdivide these, again largely for administrative reasons. Chemistry, for example, may be divided into inorganic, organic, physical, etc. branches.

The readability of three French scientific journals is examined using the Farr‐Jenkins‐Paterson simplification of the Flesch reading ease formula. The results show a relative decrease in readability with time. The results also suggest that these changes are due to changes in style or linguistic factors rather than subject characteristics.

The literature of biology is an expensive tool kept in a library, usually remote from the laboratory. Compared with modern apparatus, it appears absurdly simple. Anyone with three A‐levels can use it. Besides, the funds are separate; even if one saves money on books, one cannot buy another spectrophotometer. It is always someone else who buys books. So the literature has a high cost‐to‐use ratio.

Mountbatten offers a vivid description of the current‐awareness function using the analogy of a very wide conveyor‐belt, representing the information publishers, on which books, periodicals and reports appear at random: ‘The searcher is on a platform just above the belt and as the information material passes underneath he can pick up and read anything that he thinks might be of interest to him. You can imagine his frustration as he realises that for every item he takes time to examine, hundreds of others of possible interest to him have passed by’. Personality and environment will determine whether the individual can find an intelligent compromise between the extremes of neurosis induced by worrying about the material he is missing, or complacency with any system which produces one or two interesting items.