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A Description of the Dart R.Da.7 Mk. 531 Turboprop Engine, its Reduction Gear, Fuel System and Propeller Control System. THE power for the Hawker Siddeley 748 Series 2 is provided by the Rolls‐Royce Dart R.Da.7 Mk. 531. This engine which forms the basis of the power plant, has probably more development background than any other turboprop in service today.

FOR the last twenty years aircraft manufacturers throughout the world have been preoccupied with one specific object—the design and development of a successful replacement for the Douglas DC.3/Dakota. Well over twenty different aircraft have been designed with the primary aim of fulfilling this requirement and although one or two types have achieved sales success to the tune of orders for more than a hundred aircraft, it can be argued that these types are not true DC.3 replacements at all but highly sophisticated short‐haul airliners primarily intended for operation on comparatively high‐density routes between city airfields possessing long concrete runways.

THE enterprise of two London newspapers, the Tribune (for the second time) and the Daily Chronicle, in organizing exhibitions of books affords a convenient excuse for once again bringing forward proposals for a more permanent exhibition. On many occasions during the past twenty years the writer has made suggestions for the establishment of a central book bazaar, to which every kind of book‐buyer could resort in order to see and handle the latest literature on every subject. An experiment on wrong lines was made by the Library Bureau about fifteen years ago, but here, as in the exhibitions above mentioned, the arrangement was radically bad. Visiting the Daily Chronicle show in company with other librarians, and taking careful note of the planning, one was struck by the inutility of having the books arranged by publishers and not by subjects. Not one visitor in a hundred cares twopence whether books on electricity, biography, history, travel, or even fairy tales, are issued by Longmans, Heinemann, Macmillan, Dent or any other firm. What everyone wants to see is all the recent and latest books on definite subjects collected together in one place. The arrangements at the Chronicle and Tribune shows are just a jumble of old and new books placed in show‐cases by publishers' names, similar to the abortive exhibition held years ago in Bloomsbury Street. What the book‐buyer wants is not a miscellaneous assemblage of books of all periods, from 1877 to date, arranged in an artistic show‐case and placed in charge of a polite youth who only knows his own books—and not too much about them—but a properly classified and arranged collection of the newest books only, which could be expounded by a few experts versed in literature and bibliography. What is the use of salesmen in an exhibition where books are not sold outright? If these exhibitions were strictly limited to the newest books only, there would be much less need for salesmen to be retained as amateur detectives. Another decided blemish on such an exhibition is the absence of a general catalogue. Imagine any exhibition on business lines in which visitors are expected to cart away a load of catalogues issued separately by the various exhibitors and all on entirely different plans of arrangement! The British publisher in nearly everything he does is one of the most hopeless Conservatives in existence. He will not try anything which has not been done by his grandfather or someone even more remote, so that publishing methods remain crystallized almost on eighteenth century lines. The proposal about to be made is perhaps far too revolutionary for the careful consideration of present‐day publishers, but it is made in the sincere hope that it may one day be realized. It has been made before without any definite details, but its general lines have been discussed among librarians for years past.

“WHAT a place to be in, is an old library! It seems as though all the souls of all the writers, that have bequeathed their labours to these Bodleians, were reposing here, as in some dormitory or middle state. I do not want to handle, to profane the leaves, their winding sheets… I seem to inhale learning, walking amid their foliage.” Thus wrote Charles Lamb, of the Bodleian Library, which is the largest library to bear the name of a private benefactor, and amongst British libraries, is second only in importance to the British Museum.

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.

A study of the development of municipal corporations over the period 1835 to 1935 reveals a power struggle for supremacy over audit work between the then newly emerging accounting profession, the elected auditors and the government‐controlled district audit. Each of these groups had their “own drum to bang” as they made their case for performing the audit. This article examines their arguments by reviewing the findings of government inquiries, extensive archive material on the practice of audit and the accounting literature of the period. The article concludes with a summary of the position reached by the end of what is regarded as the formative period of continuous progress in developing the UK's system of local government.

THE credulity of enthusiasm was never better exemplified than in the case of John Dee. Here we have a man almost typical of Elizabethan England: necromancer, seer, alchemist, mathematician, and lastly, instead of firstly, natural philosopher. It was the age of portents, of abnormalities made normal, of magicians, of the powers of good and evil, of the striving after the unknown whilst the knowable was persistently overlooked. Swift sums up these philosophers in “Gulliver's Travels,” and two centuries earlier Erasmus in his “Praise of Folly” notes them. “Next come the philosophers,” he writes, “who esteem themselves the only favourites of wisdom; they build castles in the air, and infinite worlds in a vacuum. They'll give you to a hair's breadth the dimensions of the sun, when indeed they are unable to construe the mechanism of their own body: yet they spy out ideas, universals, separate forms, first matters, quiddities, formalities, and keep correspondence with the stars.” Such was John Dee, a compound of boundless enthusiasm and boundless credulity. There is nothing abnormal about him, for he is to be judged by the age in which he lived. His belief in witchcraft and intercourse with spirits was shared by all the men of his time save the abnormal Reginald Scott, whose famous “Discovery of Witchcraft” produced James the First's impassioned reply.

The results of searches on biological, medical and veterinary subjects by both the E.M. automated retrieval system and MEDLARS were compared. Of a total of 60 E.M. searches 23 were selected for the comparative study. Seven were eliminated because these needed specific terms not present in the MEDLARS terminology and 30 were omitted for other reasons. In 17 searches MEDLARS produced more relevant references than E.M. On the other hand in 12 searches the precision of E.M. was higher than that of MEDLARS. An average precision of 55 per cent was found for E.M. and of 38 per cent for MEDLARS. In 12 searches the cause of the failure to retrieve known relevant references was investigated. In MEDLARS 28 per cent was due to inadequate journal coverage and 72 per cent to indexing or searching failures (total 71 failures); in E.M. these percentages were 8 and 92 respectively (total 160 failures), the last percentage including an unknown proportion due to selective indexing of journal contents. Of 226 relevant references from E.M. and 467 relevant references from MEDLARS (the total retrieved in 15 searches), 94 references were duplicated. Recall figures were estimated: an average recall of 18 per cent was found for E.M. and 33 per cent for MEDLARS. Search strategies and indexing of overlapping references were compared. An estimate was made of the extension ratios of 12 searches. This measure averaged 1.9 for E.M. and 2.8 for MEDLARS.

I WOULD SUPPOSE that the interior of Sierra Leone is as remote as any part of West Africa. Yet Freetown, its capital, has been visited or anchored off by a not inconsiderable number of British librarians. Possessing one of the finest natural harbours in the world it was an important link in the Allied convoy system during World War II, and certainly a view of the “Lion Mountains”, even though they may often have been hidden in rain or mist, was an exciting introduction to Africa.

The Editor, when requesting this paper had clearly in mind a historical survey based on the available literature, guided and coloured by the author's own views and experience in the field. As it has turned out, the paper is less of a survey and certainly not a critical and exhaustive one but more of a personal overview. As it is based on more than 15 years experience with computers in relation to information systems, one may hope that it will meet the Editor's expectation more than half‐way.