A slim little volume called simply The Cavendish Laboratory, and
published by the Cambridge University Press at half-a-crown, tells an astonishing story, such as I suppose no other university could equal or even approach, of scientific progress at Cambridge from the opening of the first primitive Cavendish in 1874 to the remarkable climax of achievement in the recent war. It would take too much space to catalogue the great scientists whose discoveries at the Cavendish have addtd to the amenities or the miseries of mankind everywhere: it is enough to mention generally Clerk Maxwell, Rayleigh, J. J. Thomson and Rutherford. But what a record is registered in the statement that of the Professors of Physics included in the Universities Handbook for 1938, twenty-one in British Univer- sities and twenty-two in the Dominions and India had passed through the Cavendish under Thomson or Rutherford. And prac-
tically every British scientist conspicuous in atom research—Chad- wick, Cockcroft, Appleton, Blackett, Oliphant and others—was a Cavendish man. Dr. Alexander Wood, an old Cambridge friend, has packed into less than sixty pages a really fascinating story.
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