October 20, 1923] 



NA TURE 



601 



Research Items. 



The Sheel-na-gig at Oaksey. — The Sheel-na-gig 

 or phallic figure, usually found in churches, is probably 

 the survival of a fertility cult. That at Oaksey, in 

 North Wiltshire, is described in the September issue 

 of Man by Miss M. A. Murray and Mr. A. D. Passmore. 

 It is carved out of the same stone as that of the 

 church, a thirteenth - century edifice, but there is 

 nothing to show whether it is in its original position, 

 or whether it is contemporarv' with, or earlier than, 

 the church. But the size and importance of the 

 left hand in the sculpture are noteworthy and suggest 

 a pre-Christian origin for the figure. The flat surface 

 of the stone has been slightly hollowed so as to make 

 the figure stand out in relief. The weathering of the 

 stone has practically destroyed the features, which 

 appear to have been rudely indicated. 



The Island Culture Area in America. — In the 

 thirty-fourth annual report of the Bureau of American 

 Ethnology, 1912-13, recently issued, Mr. J. Walter 

 Fewkes discusses the prehistoric island culture area 

 of America. He concludes that, from the data now 

 in hand, it is possible to distinguish three cultural 

 epochs in the West Indies. The earliest people were 

 cave-dwellers, a mode of life that had not totally 

 disappeared at the arrival of Columbus, a culture 

 extending through both the Greater and Lesser 

 Antilles, though, owing to the absence of caves, it 

 naturally did not exist in the Bahamas. The absence 

 of fine stone objects separates the West Indian cave- 

 man from that of the following epoch, the agri- 

 cultural West Indian, when stonework reached a 

 perfection not excelled elsewhere in the two Americas. 

 The archaeological evidence of the third epoch, or 

 that of the mixed race formed by an amalgamation 

 of agricultural and Carib elements, appears to indicate 

 a decline in the arts, as would naturally be expected 

 from the nature of the life of the inhabitants. All 

 three .stages of culture — ^cave-man, Tainan, and Carib 

 — coexisted when the West Indies were discovered. 

 The first mentioned had been driven to isolated, 

 undesirable localities ; the Tainan held the Greater 

 Antilles, but had been submerged in the Lesser except 

 in Trinidad ; the Carib occupied the islands between 

 Trinidad and Porto Rico, and was slowly encroaching 

 on the Greater Antilles at the coming of Columbus. 



Early Arithmetical Processes. — At the recent 

 meeting of the British Association, the Rev. C. A. 

 Brodie-Brockwell, professor of Hebrew and Semitic 

 languages, law, and history in McGill University, 

 Montreal, presented to the Anthropological Section a 

 paper dealing with the evolution of arithmetic with 

 special reference to the principles of compound-time 

 or reckoning. He maintained that modern scholars, 

 through neglecting to take into account the fact that 

 pre-Christian Mediterraneans used arithmetical pro- 

 cesses without analogy in modern arithmetic, had 

 obscured the meaning of ancient time determinations. 

 He proceeded to show wherein the ancient processes 

 differed from the modern, and suggested that owing 

 to the fact that the ancients worked in units larger 

 than those we employ, it was necessary to divide or 

 siilxlivide according to the method of computation 

 1)1 fore the ficures were comparable with modern cal- 

 Mil;it i'li, ;. Till;-;, .-iccording to the method of com- 

 jMii.ii Kill, ;iii\ L'!\cii ri,L;iii(.; may be divisible by two, 

 llircr, u\- lour to ;irii\c rit its iDndnii ci jui\'a]ent. 

 I'rol. I '.r()( l{\sfll coihIikU'iI liy (liiiioiist i iitiii:^ the 

 application ol his theory of compound-tinn- to ;t 

 Babylonian t.ilkt, previously undeciphered, whuh 

 was discovered by Prof. Ilil)irc(ht, io I'laio's 

 M ilii I'Mtifn Cycle, and to Proi his' I 'yt hmcnic I mlu, <_■:;. 



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Imagery in Thinking. — In Discovery for August, 

 Prof. T. H. Pear gives a very lucid account 

 of the vehicles and routes of thought. He thinks 

 that the recent mobilisation of psychologists for 

 practical work has led to the neglect of a problem 

 which at first sight appears rather theoretical, but 

 may actually have far-reaching practical results. It 

 is well known that people vary in the way in which 

 they think, but having classified people as visuals or 

 audiles, there is a tendency to neglect the conse- 

 quences. The writer thinks that for practical pur- 

 poses people can be described as visualisers or verbal- 

 isers according as they tend to think in pictures or 

 words. Each type of thinking has its own advantages 

 and also its own drawbacks, and extremes of 

 either type often fail to understand the other, not 

 infrequently with serious consequences. Should a 

 teacher or a doctor be too exclusively one type it 

 might account for some failures in dealing with 

 particular pupils or patients. The visualiser he holds 

 is less likely to be impressed by an orator's rumbling 

 stream of words or less easily hypnotised by a sonorous 

 phrase or platitude, but, as against this, he may be 

 paralysed by impressive tailoring or a pretty smile. 

 The article is an excellent example of sound scientific 

 thought expressed in non-technical language. 



Sex Reversal in the Common Fowl. — At the 

 recent meeting of the British Association in Liver- 

 pool, no little interest was excited by Dr. F. A. E. 

 Crew's account of a case of complete sex-reversal in 

 the common fowl. A hen, after laying a number of 

 fertile eggs in a perfectly normal manner, was con- 

 verted into a cock which became the father of chicks. 

 This remarkable reversal of sex seems to have 

 resulted from the destruction of the ovary by tuber- 

 cular disease and its replacement by testes. Dr. 

 Crew has published his observations on this and 

 similar cases in a recent number of the Proceedings 

 of the Royal Society (Series B, Vol. 95, No. 667) and 

 Miss Honor B. Fell gives a more detailed account of 

 their histological features in the first number of the 

 British Journal of Experimental Biology (October) . 



Reproduction in P.iLfni-sTK/x.i jeivk/xsi. — It has 

 long been suspected that the Gasteropod mollusc, 

 Paludestrina jenkinsi, reproduces itself by means of 

 parthenogenetic ova. If so, it is the only mollusc in 

 which this phenomenon is known to occur. The 

 probability is converted into a practical certainty by 

 the careful breeding experiments of Mr. Guy C. 

 Robson, described in the first number of the British 

 Journal of Experimental Biology (October). No male 

 has ever been observed and there is no evidence of 

 hermaphroditism. This little snail is also remarkable 

 for the curious manner in which, in the British Isles 

 at any rate, it has extended its range in recent 

 years from brackish estuaries to inland fresh waters, 

 which, as Mr. Robson suggests, may have something 

 to do with its parthenogenetic habits. 



The Siiaim: of Plant Cells. — The botanist who 

 is under th(^ impression that the typical shape and 

 mode of division of a normal parenchymatous cell is 

 fully represented by the usual text-book dii-i mi, 

 where such cells are always in transverse or longi- 

 tudinal section, is recommended to study the paper 

 by Mr. Ircderic T. Lewis in the Proceedings of the 

 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vol. 58, 

 No. 15. The author has prepared serial microtome 

 sections of the pith of the elder, from which outline 

 drawings and then wax models of the cells have been 

 prepared by standard methods. The result is to 

 show that the cells are essentially tetrakaidecahedra, 



