December 28, 191 1] 



NATURE 



295 



being attacked in this country partly by observations of 

 pilot balloons and partly by observations near the earth's 

 surface of the angle of elevation of a balloon, which in a 

 horizontal wind floats very nearly at the same level as the 

 point to which it is attached. Special difficulties arise 

 owing to the rapid increase of the errors of observation in 

 the first method as the balloon travels away from the 

 observers, and to the influence of the instability of the 

 wake in the second method. Dr. Lude wig's contribution 

 will therefore be of special interest. He uses the principle 

 that the barometer in the balloon shows the height above 

 sea-level, and therefore the rate at which the balloon is 

 rising relative to the earth, while a vertical anemometer 

 carried by the balloon shows the rate at which the balloon 

 rises relative to the air. The difference between the two 

 rates gives the rate at which the air is rising relative to the 

 earth or the strength of the vertical current. 



The construction of a suitable anemometer is the prin- 

 cipal difficulty. Dr. Ludewig uses a fan in a small 

 cylinder, which hangs from the balloon in a vertical posi- 

 tion ; the revolutions of the fan are recorded photographic- 

 ally by an ingenious device, so that the inertia and friction 

 are reduced to a minimum. When the anemometer was 

 suspended in a horizontal current of air, the fan did not 

 rotate, so that effects arising from variations in the hori- 

 zontal velocity were practically eliminated. In addition to 

 a barograph, a Bestelmeyer variometer was used. The 

 instrument is a form of eye-readrng microbarograph, which 

 permitted of great accuracy in determining the small varia- 

 tions in altitude as the balloon travelled across the country. 

 In the first ascent, made on January 22, 191 1, the results 

 obtained from the variometer and the anemometer agreed 

 so closely that it was evident that no vertical currents were 

 present. In the third ascent, on February i8th, when there 

 was a steep gradient for westerly winds over central 

 Europe, strong vertical currents were experienced, and the 

 instrumental measurements showed that the motion was 

 mainly upwards, and reached at times a speed of 3 metres 

 per second at altitudes slightly less than one kilometre. 

 h. curve, showing in profile the country passed over by the 

 balloon during the period for which the diagram of vertical 

 motion is drawn, would add interest to the latter and 

 possibly suggest the causes of the rapid variations in the 

 upward current. E. Gold. 



BEACH-LA-MAR, THE JARGON OF THE 

 WESTERN PACIFIC. 



B' 



EACH-LA-MAR is that peculiar variety of English 

 speech which has arisen from the contact of uncultured 

 civilisation with the savage or semi-civilised peoples of the 

 western Pacific. It is a language born of the necessity of 

 comprehension between primitive traders, and is thus, in 

 its nature and purpose, akin to the Lingua Franca of the 

 Levant, the Pidgin of the China Seas, the Chinook of the 

 American fur trade, the Negro-English of the Guiana 

 plantations, and the Krooboy talk of the African coast. Its 

 lame suggests but one of its origins, for Beach-la-mar is 

 ~he sailor's mispronunciation of B6che-de-mer, a name of 

 r^he Trcpang or Holothuria, which was prepared on the 

 island shores for the markets of the East Indies. But the 

 language began with the American whalers and the sandal- 

 wood gatherers of the early nineteenth century, who 

 preceded the hichc-de-mer fishers of the 'forties and 'fifties, 

 the decay of the trepang industry the talk passed to 

 copra-collectors and the beach-combers, and was finally 

 settled as the jargon of the Pacific by the " blackbirding '' 

 (more delicately described as the " recruiting of Polynesian 

 labour ") in the 'sixties, when it became the common 

 speech of the natives on the Queensland plantations. 



Few have recorded the speech, and in an entertaining 



little volume Mr. Churchill has noted all that is to be found 



relating to it, with some chapters by way of introduction.' 



^Ir. Churchill discusses the art of breaking English into 



on. It is delightfully simple, for " the proper way to 



ice a foreigner understand what you would say is to use 



ken English." Politeness may give way to emphasis. 



" Beach-la-mar, ihe Jargon or Trade ."Speech of the Western Pacific." 

 VUIiam Churchill. Pp. 54. (Published by the Carnegie Institution of 

 .ington, 1911.) 



NO. 2200, VOL. 88] 



u 



Grammar and the elegances of speech do not matter. The 

 want of these will not shock the native, for in no native 

 language is it possible to be ungrammatical. In them 

 intelligible speech consists in the placing of the vocables in 

 the right order. Inaccurate arrangement is unintelligible 

 nonsense. The native subjects the broken English to the 

 rules of his own speech. As to this, Mr. Churchill, pre- 

 mising that a single parent for the many and diverse 

 languages of Melanesia is as yet unproved, recognises that 

 all the languages of that region are practically on the same 

 plane of development, and so uses the designation 

 " Melanesian speech " to indicate a composite of the know- 

 ledge of the languages there spoken. He regards them as 

 isolating languages, and rejects the Malayo-Polynesian 

 theory of Bopp, as well as the application to them' of the 

 term " agglutinative." He believes the words may be 

 separated into monosyllabic elements, and these even may 

 be susceptible of ultimate reduction to vowels, to which 

 may be prefixed or suffixed a consonant with a definite 

 power of qualifying or fixing a special meaning to the stem. 



The rules of isolating speech applied to the Broken 

 English formed the Beach-la-mar. 



The vocabulary is nearly all English, and the marine 

 element is strong. Mr. Churchill says, " There can be no 

 hesitation in ascribing to forecastle English such exotics as 

 pickaninny, calaboose, and savvy — longshore sweepings from 

 the Spanish Main. The squareface, sole landward hope of 

 the sailor, is scarcely known ashore. The sailor dialect has 

 kept alive, and has given to these remote savages the 

 special sense of sing out and look out, of capsize along with 

 copper, of slew, of look alive, of adrift and fashion. Of 

 certain elements of low, cant, vulgar English the sailors may 

 have been the carriers." The Kanakas in the Queensland 

 plantations enriched the vocabulary with Austral English, 

 and to this " we must ascribe in the greater measure the 

 inclusion of such terms as tumble down and blackfellow, of 

 flash and trash, of hook it and clear out, of hump and 

 wire in, of gammon and bloody." Such words as kaikai, 

 food, likelik, little, tambo or tabu come from the island 

 tongues, and one word, rauss (? clear out) is German. 



Mr. Churchill has given a bibliography of the subject in 

 fifteen entries. He has produced a most instructive and 

 interesting book. It illustrates a simple language in the 

 making, and records a form of speech which will disappear 

 with colonisation and mission schools. It is to the presence 

 of these in the Torres Straits that a decadence in jargon 

 noted by Mr. Churchill is due. Sidney H. Ray. 



T//E FRACTURE OF FLINT BY NATURE 

 AND B V MAN. 



A T a meeting of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia, 

 held at Norwich on November 4, the natural fracture 

 of flint and its bearing on rudimentary flint implements 

 was discussed by Mr. J. Reid-Moir. 



Subjoined is a summary of the main points described : — 



(i) Experiments were shown in natural percussion pro- 

 duced by placing a number of flint nodules in a sack and 

 shaking them violently together. The following results 

 were obtained : — 



First, some of the flints were flaked on the edg<» by 

 blows which had impinged at all angles, as would b<» 

 expected from fortuitous blows. 



Secondly, nearly all the blows had impingfd obliquply, 

 thereby blunting the edge and showing prominent ripple- 

 marks. 



On the other hand, human blows are always delivered 

 at a constant angle to the edge of the flint, and are 

 delivered vertically to the edge, as it is much easier to 

 remove flakes thus than by oblique blows, which is 

 nature's method. 



Nature must of necessity detach flakes obliquely, because 

 out of the 180 angles at which it is possible to edge-flake a 

 flint, there is only one which gives a true vertical flake. 



The.se vertical flakes do not show ripple marks, as tho 

 force of the blow does not pass through the body of the 

 flint. 



It was also seen that fortuitous blows produced a large 

 number of truncated flakes on the edge of the flints, which 

 are not seen to anything like such a large extent on human 



