156 NATURAL SCIENCE ^ [September 



forthcoming, and it is greatly to be hoped that attention may be 

 directed to this custom wherever it occurs, as the procedure observed 

 amongst races in a low condition of culture may help to throw 

 further light upon the archaeological aspect of the question. 



Speak-throwers from New Guinea 



Mr T. Jennings (Proc. Linn. Soc, N.S.W., 1896, p. 793) has 

 recently described in detail and figured two Papuan spear-throwers 

 of bambu from New Guinea. These instruments have only com- 

 paratively recently been recognised as occurring in New Guinea, 

 though numbers have now been received in the various European 

 museums. The type is interesting for its form, which differs from 

 that of the well-known hook-ended spear-throwers of Australia, and 

 resembles rather that of the socket-ended examples from the Caro- 

 line and Pelew Islands, figured by Dr von Luschan. The addition 

 of a wooden flange as a rest for the spear is peculiar to New 

 Guinea, and the carving on these rests is often elaborate, and is varied 

 individually, no two, probably, being quite similar. The original 

 design in nearly all cases has apparently been some animal form 

 grotesquely treated. The two examples described by Mr Jennings 

 differ somewhat in detail from those figured by Dr von Luschan in 

 his more elaborate paper on the subject, published in the Bastian 

 Festschrift. Mr Jennings adds a few remarks upon the peculiar 

 geographical distribution of these implements, but his account does 

 not aim at being a complete one, and the distribution is pretty well 

 known. 



Cycads 



In our last number (p. 85) we referred to some recent work by a 

 Japanese investigator which gave additional interest to an ancient 

 and always interesting group of plants. The Cycads are the oldest 

 family of seed-plants. They had reached and passed their maxi- 

 mum (in Triassic and Jurassic ages) before the appearance of the 

 angiospermous type which is dominant at the present day. Their 

 habit, a simple, short stem with a crown of leaves, recalls the 

 tree-fern much more than our dicotyledonous forest-tree with its 

 widely branching axis and small deciduous leaves. And the dis- 

 covery, of which we gave a short account last month, was only an 

 additional evidence of the fact, recognised now for more than 

 thirty years, that Cycads, if not a connecting link, are at any rate 

 representatives of a type of plant-life occupying a place in the 

 scale of evolution between ferns and those seed-plants in which 

 the ovules are packed away in a closed ovary-chamber. Their 

 occurrence to-day is what we should expect in a disappearing but 



