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 ‘‘ The 
“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 Poggendorff’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 hitherto 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.R.S., in the 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’’: “TFT 
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 Royal. 
Society of Science, of Norway, in his book, (Among Cannibals ”’ 
(1889), says: ‘‘ The peculiarity of the boomerang, that it 
returns of itself to the thrower, depends on the fact that it is 
twisted ; the twisting is accomplished by putting it in water 
and then heating it in the ashes, and in finally bending it ; but 
this warp must be occasionally 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- 
