432 



NATURE 



[SePTEMBKR 22, 1923 



the Royal Ontario Nickel Commission, with which the 

 name of its chairman, Mr. G. T. Holloway, will always 

 be associated. The little book before us is very well 

 written ; within the space of little more than a hundred 

 paj^'t's it deals clearly and comprehensively with this 

 suhjcct and should prove extremely useful to the 

 non-technical reader, who wants trustworthy general 

 information concerning a metal, the industrial appli- 

 cations of which have been increasing steadily during 

 recent years. To any one desiring such information 

 the book can be heartily recommended. 



(5) This work is necessarily entirely different from 

 those already considered ; it is a scientific report, 

 addressed to the Colonial Secretary, upon the known 

 copper deposits in the Island of Cyprus and the possi- 

 bility of discovering others of economic importance. 

 Apart from the economic aspect of the work, it possesses 

 a high degree of historical and antiquarian interest, 

 for it is generally held that the main supplies of copper 

 in early historic times were derived from this island, 

 which is indeed said to have given its name to the metal. 

 The deposits of copper ore now known are, however, 

 of relatively low grade, consisting in fact of cupri- 

 ferous pyrites rather than of true copper ores, but this 

 fact is not incompatible with the previous existence, 

 at the outcrops of such deposits, of gozzans rich in 

 oxidised ores, with possibly a zone of secondarily 

 enriched sulphide ores immediately below them. Such 

 ores could have been successfully treated in those 

 ancient times, although it may be doubted whether 

 metallurgical skill was equal to the task of extract- 

 ing the copper from a low grade cupriferous pyrites. 

 Nor would it be at all extraordinary that an industry- 

 carried on for some thousands of years should have 

 worked up every trace of available mineral. 



The report indicates that there is only one mine of 

 economic importance known up-to-date in the Island 

 of Cyprus, namely, the Skouriotissa mine, worked by an 

 American company, the Cyprus Mines Corporation. 

 The mineral deposit consists of a large mass of cupri- 

 ferous pyrites, estimated to contain some six million 

 tons of ore assaying apparently between 49 and 50 

 percent, of sulphur and between i'8 and 2-5 per cent, of 

 copper. An English company, the Cyprus Sulphur and 

 Copper Company, holds a concession on the Lymni 

 mine, estimated to contain 2 J million tons of ore in the 

 form of disseminated cupriferous pyrites, with 19-5 

 per cent, of sulphur and 1*25 per cent, of copper, which 

 is thus too poor to be capable of profitable exploitation 

 at the moment. A number of prospecting permits 

 have been granted, and the authors of the report state 

 the grounds upon which they consider it quite possible 

 that other payable ore bodies may yet be discovered. 

 The authors may fairiy be congratulated upon the 

 NO. 2812, VOL. I I 2] 



publication of on excellent piece of work, which will 

 intert^st equally the minin-^' ':vo\(v/\s\. and the archaeo- 

 logist. Henky Lol'Is. 



Our Bookshelf. 



Liverpool Marine Biology Committee. L.M.B.C. 

 Memoirs on Typical British Marine Plants and 

 Animals. XXV : Asterias. By Herbert C. Chad- 

 wick. Pp. viii4-63, 9 plates. (Liverpool: Uni- 

 versity of Liverpool Press, Ltd. ; London : Hodder 

 and Stoughton, Ltd.. 1923.) 45. 6i. net. 



To this useful series of descriptions of common marine 

 animals and plants Mr. Chadwick has previously con- 

 tributed excellent accounts of Pkhinus, Antedon, and 

 Echinoderm Larvx-. This description of our common 

 starfish {Asterias nibens), with its nine carefully drawn 

 and clearly reproduced plates, even betters his previous 

 performance. 



While taking advantage of the large amount if 

 previous work on this well-knowTi echincderm. notably 

 the embr)'ological observations of Profs. MacBride 

 and Gemmill, Mr. Chadwick appears to have verified 

 nearly all his statements by his own dissection and 

 observation, and when he has not done so he is care- 

 ful to say as much, as well as to indicate one or two 

 points in which he has been led to differ from the 

 majority. Thus, he does not believe that a single ray 

 can regenerate the whole animal ; Helen Dean King, 

 he might have noted, proved twenty-five years ago 

 that to effect this the ray must retain approximately 

 one-fifth of the disc. 



On the vexed question of the axial organ and axial 

 sinus Mr. Chadwick " is inclined to support Gemmill's 

 conclusions that in Asterids this system is really 

 haemal, etc." This may be true physiologically and 

 in part, though some of the evidence, as he admits, is 

 not conclusive ; but it does not rule out the morpho- 

 logical interpretation of the organ as a genital stolon, 

 a view, by the way, which is far from having originated 

 with MacBride, as Mr. Chadwick implies. Among the 

 divergent accounts of the minute histolog\- of the eye- 

 spot, that of Cuenot is most in accord with Mr. Chad- 

 wick's own observations, but differs from them in 

 denying any lenticular thickening of the cuticle. 

 Though in his diagrams he draws and denotes the 

 apical nervous system, " the writer has been unable 

 to find any trace of this system in any of the large 

 number of serial sections examined by him." 



One or two points of terminology- are open to question. 

 If, as is generally admitted, the terminals are homo- 

 logous with the [first] radials of Crinoidea, it is puzzling 

 to call the plates which lie proximally to them the 

 first, second, etc., radials ; they correspond to the 

 superbasals of Acrocrinus. The rays are numbered 

 according to the method of MacBride and Gemmill. 

 The method which I based on the primar>- water-pore 

 as a fixed point, and w-hich Sedgwick adopted as con- 

 ducing to clearness and precision, is, in Jilr. Chadwick's 

 opinion, " worthy of the fullest consideration," but 

 he does not seem to have given full consideration to 

 the criticism of the Gemmill-MacBride system pub- 

 lished in my " Studies on Edrioasteroidea." In any 



