1893 ] NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. 83 



You may find in the dusty tomes of the Patent Office his inter- 

 esting specifications, wherein he puts it on record that " Tbe 

 * Bommareng ' (as he spelled it), is a remarkable species of mis- 

 sile in use amongst the savages of Australia, and is a bent 

 blade, so warped as to form a portion of a screw." 



Brande & Cox, in the " Dictionary of Science and Art," speak 

 rather vaguely of this invention as "the plane of a screw 

 equally poised obliquely about a balanced centre." But as one 

 writer naively says, "The idea never found favor with ship 

 builders." But Sir Thomas had, among theorists, at least, a 

 warm and enthusiastic following — perspiring, I might add, for 

 one professor narrates how he stood over a pot of boiling water 

 for two hours in order to give to a boomerang he was making 

 its requisite warp. Prof. Erdmann, of Berlin, in Poggeudorft's 

 Annalen (1868) records how he found this essential warp or 

 twist to amount to exactly 17 centimeters — about 20 degrees. 



Prof. Werner Stille says also in Poggendorff 's Annalen (1872), 

 " The essential parts in fact are the warped surface ; when the 

 instrument rotates in the air this surface acts similar to a screw 

 or to the sweep of a wind-mill." But he adds, '' The problem 

 can only be considered as solved when we possess the equations 

 of the curves described by the instrument — the solution has 

 not hitliefto been successfully made." And he proceeds to 

 make it and wields the process of the calculus through some 

 sixteen pages of convincing (?) calculations, based upon the 

 warped surface. 



Lieut.-Gen. Pitt Rivers, F.E.S., \nihe Anthropological Journal, 

 says, "The form of the returning boomerang, its curve, its 

 twist, and its peculiar section, have long been known. It has a 

 slight lateral twist, by means of which it is caused to rise in. 

 the air." 



We read also in Smyth's "Aborigines of Victoria": "I 

 never saw a wonguim (the boomerang that returns), made by 

 the natives of Victoria, that was not twisted." 



And again, Carl Lumholtz, M.A., member of the Eoyal 

 Society of Science, of Norway, in his book, (Among Cannibals " 

 (1889), says : " The peculiarit}' of the boomerang, that it 

 returns of itself to the thrower, depends on the fact that it is 

 twisted ; the twisting is accomplished by j^utting it in water 

 and then heating it in the ashes, and in finally bending it ; but 

 this warp must be occasionall}' renewed."' 



Thus by eminent authorities the screw twist assumes a posi- 

 tion of even greater importance among the so-called essential 

 qualities of a good boomerang than that of the rounded upper 

 surface. We express no wonder at the mistakes of early explor- 



