ABSTRACT
On 15 August 1905 a party of some 200 official members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science arrived in Cape Town on board the Union Castle Liner, Saxon. The voyage had been pleasantly uneventful and the visitors occupied their time with an extensive programme of lectures and discussions, games and entertainments, and scientific experiments besides. 2 The boundaries between amusement and scientific investigation were not rigidly maintained. It was in the jovial spirit of scientific adventure, we must therefore assume, that the head of the president of the Association, the mathematician and astronomer George Darwin (son of Charles) consented to having his head measured with a pair of calipers as he reclined on deck in a comfortable cane armchair. 3
