732 NATURAL SCIENCE. „gc.. 



the Laos ; a quid of it seems indispensable for men engaged in hard 

 work such as poling or rowing. 



The price of the prepared article at the village visited was one 

 rupee (is. 3d.) for twelve packages, a package containing ten bundles 

 or handfuls. In Chiengmai it was dearer, seven to ten packages 

 being sold for the same money. 



Animals once supposed to be extinct are still being discovered 

 in Australia, the refuge for so many ancient forms of life. The latest 

 announcement is the fact that all the freshwater herrings observed 

 by Mr. Ogilby in certain rivers of New South Wales are doubly 

 armoured, i.e., they have a row of scutes on the back resembling the 

 ordinary armature on the ventral border. In the last number of the 

 Ann. Mag. Nat. Hist. (ser. 6, vol. x., p. 413), Mr. Smith Woodward 

 points out that this is a peculiarity exhibited by most of the extinct 

 herrings of the latter part of the Cretaceous and the early part of the 

 Tertiary period. They are assigned to the genus Diplomystus, and 

 have been found fossil in Brazil, Wyoming, the Isle of Wight, and 

 Syria. Such herrings do not appear to have hitherto been detected 

 in any part of the world in rocks of later date than the Oligocene, 

 and Mr. Ogilby's discovery in the freshwaters of New South Wales 

 is thus of great interest. 



We are glad to find that there are still some anatomists who 

 read Sir Richard Owen's works. In the American Naturalist for 

 November, Professor Victor Carus points out that Owen described 

 the cervical vertebrae in Ornithorhynchns as having no zygapophyses, 

 while in Echidna only the atlas has these processes. The reason for 

 the Professor's letter is that Dr. .Georg Baur has recorded this 

 observation as new {Amer. Nat., 1892, p. 72), and commented on the 

 fact that Flower and Lydekker have not noticed it. There are 

 fashions in " authorities " as in more commonplace affairs, and the 

 time will yet come when the great pioneers in Natural Science are 

 duly respected. 



In the November number of the Ann. and Mag. Nat. Hist., the 

 Rev. F. O. Pickard Cambridge describes two new forms of British 

 Spiders. The one, Tmeticus simplex, was found in abundance in a damp 

 cellar at Cannock, Staffordshire, and the other, Leptyphantes plumiger, 

 most probably came from Hyde Bog, near Wareham, Dorset. Figures 

 of both species are given. 



A URiEi- memoir of the late Thomas Roberts appeared in 

 Natural Science for March (p. 76). We have now the satisfaction 

 to announce that the Essay on " The Jurassic Rocks of the Neigh- 

 bourhood of Cambridge," for which he gained the Sedgwick Prize in 



