Feb. 20, 1890J 



NATURE 



%n 



launch stranded, and fifteen canoes, carrying about 150 natives, 

 bore down upon the explorers and commenced a savage attack. 

 The Governor's party opened fire, and the natives promptly 

 beat a retreat. After about half an hour, however, they re- 

 turned, bringing a pig as a peace offering. Sir William conse- 

 quently went 180 miles further up the river, and on his return 

 visited the same people again, to find them quite peaceably in- 

 clined. The Governor started again on December 26 to explore 

 higher up the Fly River. 



The Survey Department of Burmah has in preparation a new 

 map containing all the latest information derived from the 

 parties sent out by the Department. A preliminary issue 

 omitting all the mountain ranges has recently been published. 



SiGNOR G. B. Sacchiero, Italian Consul at Rangoon, sends 

 to the Bollettino of the Italian Geographical Society for 

 December an interesting notice of the savage Chin tribes who 

 occupy the hilly region in the north of Burma about the head- 

 waters of the Irawady. The collective tribal name is variously 

 written Chin, Kyen, Kiyin, Kachin, Kakyen, &c. ; but they call 

 themselves Sihu, and according to Signor Sacchiero they evi- 

 dently belong to the Burmese branch of the Mongol stock. 

 In the districts brought under British rule many have already 

 adopted the Burmese dress, and these can with difficulty be 

 •distinguished from the Burmese themselves. But the language 

 is more allied to that of the widespread Karen race, and the 

 Karen alphabet composed by the American missionaries in 

 Lower Burma is well suited for expressing the sdunds of the 

 Chin idiom. The Chins themselves have no knowledge of 

 letters ; nor have they made any progress beyond the rudest state 

 of social culture. They still go nearly naked, and the women on 

 arriving at the age of puberty are tattooed all over the face with 

 a black pigment, being thus disfigured for life, either to prevent 

 the Burmese or the neighbouring tribes from kidnapping them, 

 or else to distinguish them from the women captured by the 

 Chins from the surrounding peoples. They marry early, the 

 bride requiring the consent, not of her parents, but of an elder 

 brother, and the husband promising not to beat her too much, 

 nor to cut her hair if she behaves well. The family yields 

 obedience to the father alone, who recognizes no authority 

 except that of the village chief, this authority passing in both 

 cases to the youngest son. The men always carry firearms, and 

 make their own gunpowder, using instead of sulphur a seed 

 called aunglak, first roasted, and then pounded up with charcoal 

 and saltpetre, three parts of the two first to twenty of the 

 last, and mixing the w hole with alcohol, or tobacco juice. Both 

 sexes smoke little Indian hookahs, and their favourite drink is 

 khaung, a kind of beer extracted from fermented rice. They 

 live mainly by the chase, and when a boar, stag, or other big 

 game is captured, there are great rejoicings in the village. The 

 quarry is covered from neck to tail in a red cloth, and pre- 

 sented to the " temple," or abode of the iiat (spirit); then the 

 "friend of the nat" (priest) pronounces a blessing on the success- 

 ful hunter, after which all join in the feast, with much tam- 

 taming, shouting, drinking, and dancing through the village. 

 When they descend to the plains, the Chins are Buddhists, but 

 in their villages spirit-worshipper--. Not only every village and 

 every district, but every person has his special tiat, mostly a 

 malevolent being who requires to be pacified by propitiatory 

 offerings. The vendetta is a universal institution, feuds being 

 inherited from family to family, from tribe to tribe, and thus 

 leading to constant bloodshed. If a man is drowned, his son 

 reeks vengeance on the water where he perished by piercing it 

 with spears or slashing it about with long knive^. Many of the 

 Chins have already tendered their submission to the British 

 authorities, and arrangements are now in progress for extending 

 orderly government over the whole territory. 



ON SOME NEEDLESS DIFFICULTIES IN 

 THE STUDY OF NATURAL HISTORY} 



J\ LITTLE while ago I read, in the preface to a work on 

 natural history, that the book was •' of little value to the 

 scientific reader, but that its various anecdotes, and its minute 

 detail of observation would be found useful and entertaining." 



What, then, may the "scientific reader" be expected to 

 desire ? He must be, in my opinion, a most unreasonable man, 



' The Presidential Address to the Royal Microscopical Society, at the 

 annual meeting, on February 12, 1890, by Dr. C. T. Hudson, F.R.S. 



if he does not thankfully welcome anecdotes of the creatures he 

 wishes to study, when these anecdotes are the result of patient 

 and accurate observation. For it is precisely such information, 

 that is conspicuously absent from many scientific memoirs and 

 monographs ; the author generally spending his main space and 

 strength in examining the shape and structure of his animals, 

 and in comparing one with another, but giving the most meagre 

 details of their lives and habits. 



Which, then, is the more scientific treatment of a group of 

 animals — that which catalogues, classifies, measures, weighs, 

 counts, and dissects, or that which simply observes and relates? 

 Or, to put it in another way, which is the better thing to do — 

 to treat the animal as a dead specimen, or as a living one ? 



Merely to state the question is to answer it. It is the living 

 animal that is so intensely interesting, and the main use of 

 the indexing, classifying, measuring, and counting is to enable 

 us to recognize it when aliye, and to help us to understand its 

 perplexing actions. 



But, it may be objected, that because the study of the living 

 animal is the more interesting, it is not necessarily the more 

 scientific ; indeed, that the amount of entertainment, which we 

 may get out of the pursuit of natural history, has nothing to do 

 with the question at all ; that by science we mean accurate 

 knowledge presented in the most suitable form ; that shape, 

 structure, number, weight, comparison are the fundamental 

 notions, with wttich sciences of every kind have to deal ; and 

 that scientific natural history is more properly that which takes 

 cognizance of a creature's size, form, bodily organs, and rela- 

 tion to other creatures, than that which concerns itself with the 

 animal's disposition and habits. 



I can fancy that I already hear some of my audience say : 

 ",But why set up any antagonism between these two ways of 

 studying a creature ? Both are necessary to its thorough com- 

 prehension, and our text-books should contain information of 

 both kinds ; we should be told how an animal is made, where 

 it ought to be placed among others of the same group, and 

 also how it lives, and what are its ways." 



Precisely ; that is just what memoirs and text-books ought to 

 do ; but what, too often, they do noL We read much of the 

 animal's organs ; we see plates showing that its bristles have 

 been counted, and its musculir fibres traced to the last thread ; 

 we have the structure of its tissues analyzed to their very ele- 

 ments ; we have long discussions on its title to rank with this 

 group or that ; and sometimes even disquisitions on the probable 

 form and habits of some extremely remote, but quite hypothe- 

 tical ancestor — some " archirotator " (to take an instance from 

 my own subject) who is made to degrade in this way, or to ad- 

 vance in that, or who is credited with one organ, or deprived of 

 another, just as the ever-varying necessities of a desperate 

 hypothesis require : — but of the living creature itself, of the 

 way it lives, of the craft with which it secures its prey or out- 

 wits its enemies, of the home that it constructs, of its charming 

 confidence or its diabolical temper, of its curious courtship, its 

 droll tricks, its games of play, its fun and spite, of its perplexing 

 stupidity coupled with actions of almost human sagacity — of all 

 this, this which is the real natural history of the animal, we, too 

 often, hear little or nothing. And the reason is obvious, for 

 in many cases the writer has no such information to give ; and, 

 even when he has, he is compelled by fashion to give so much 

 space to that which is considered to be the more scientific portion 

 of his subject, that he has scant room for the more interesting. 

 Neither ought we to be surprised if a writer is " gravelled for 

 the lack of matter," when he comes to speak of an animal's 

 life ; for the study of the lives of a large majority is a difficult 

 one. It requires not only abundant leisure, but superabundant 

 patience, a residence favourably situated for the pursuit, and an 

 equally favourable condition of things at home. The student, 

 too, must be ready to adopt the inconvenient hours of the crea- 

 tures that he watches, and be indifferent to the criticisms of 

 those that watch Aim. If his enthusiasm will not carry him, 

 without concern, through dark nights, early mornings, vile 

 weather, fatiguing distances, and caustic chaff, the root of the 

 matter is not in him. Besides, he ought to have a natural apti- 

 tude for the pursuit, and know how to look for what he wants 

 to see ; or if he does not know, to be able to make a shrewd 

 guess : and, above all, when circumstances are not favourable, 

 to have wit enough to invent some means of making them so. 

 And yet when the place, the man, the animals, and the circum- 

 stances all seem to promise a rich harvest of observations, how 

 often it happens that some luckless accident, a snapt twig, a 



