March 13, 1879] 



NATURE 



431 



and other European dances. The author enjoyed himself 

 so much in Ohinemotu that he spent all his money and 

 had to travel to Tauranga on foot. Here he saw the 

 ceremony of nose-rubbing performed with great solemnity ; 

 it is, however, now kept up almost only by the old ; the 

 young Maoris have taken to kissing as a substitute. 

 There is still a wide tract of the northern island of New 

 Zealand 1,000,000 acres in extent, known as King Coimtry, 

 inhabited by about 10,000 Maoris under King Tawhiao, 

 who keep themselves free from British rule, and do not 

 permit whites to enter their country. King Country 

 seems to be a thorn in the side of the Government, and 

 the city of refuge of murderers and thieves, who are 

 there out of harm's way. 



At the Fiji group, the author visited only one island, 

 that of Kandavu, at which the mail steamers call. He, 

 however, explored a great deal of this island, in company 

 with the natural history collector employed by Goddefroy 

 Brothers, Herr Kleinschmidt, who is laboriously ex- 

 hausting the fauna of the Fiji group, collecting carefully 

 for several months in each island. The author's accoimt 

 of Kandavu, and especially of the natives, is full of 

 interest. One of his observations may be cited here. A 

 Fijian youth, employed as an assistant in collecting, whose 

 body was already beautified by many cicatrisations, was 

 devoting his attention to two groups of small suppurating 

 wounds on the outer side of each upper arm. When 

 visitors from neighbouring villages were present, he used 

 to open these wounds anew and inflame them with a 

 burning stick, or sand, or by scratching them with glass, 

 in order to show his fortitude, never moving a muscle of 

 his face in public, but making very wry faces afterwards 

 in private. Many other youths had similar wounds on 

 their upper arms, and it turned out that vaccination was 

 being carried out by the Government in Kandavu, village 

 by village, and that pustules on the upper arm were hence 

 the fashion. The dandies would not wait till the turn of 

 their village arrived, or perhaps the natives wished to 

 avoid the actual operation by giving their arms the ap- 

 pearance of having been already vaccinated. 



The author very rightly denounces the absurd method 

 of spelling the Fijian language introduced by the mission- 

 aries. Because, in Fijian words, before the sounds d g k 

 and »;, an n nearly always is sounded, and before b, an ;«, 

 the missionaries in first wTiting the language chose to 

 omit the m and n in all cases in spelling before these 

 letters, which complicates matters unnecessarily, and 

 must eventually give great trouble to Fijians when they 

 come to read English. Thus Thakombau, the name of 

 the former king of Fiji, is spelt Thakobau. Kandavu is 

 spelt Kada\-n. Some writers have carried useless con- 

 fusion still further, and have rendered th by c, so that 

 Thakombau becomes Cacobau, and so it \vas most often 

 spelt in newspapers at the time of the annexation of 

 Fiji, so that English readers derived very little impression 

 of the real sound of the name. 



The author proceeded to Honolulu by Pacific mail 

 steamer. Amongst the passengers was a San Francisco 

 concert company and a reverend Yankee travelling lec- 

 turer. The concert company hoped to give a performance 

 on the day on which the steamer stopped at Honolulu on 

 its way to San Francisco, but the lecturer had been too 

 sharp for them, and had engaged the only available hall 



long beforehand, and they found the town posted all over 

 with advertisements of his lecture on the Tower of 

 London. The author visited Hilo, in Hawaii, and the 

 volcano of Kilauea. He returned from Hawaii to Hono- 

 lulu in an open whale-boat, touching at the island of 

 Maui on the way, an exploit which seems to have as- 

 tonished the people of Honolulu extremely, since they have 

 come to rely upon schooners and steamboats entirely for 

 such long passages, and no longer make the voyage, as 

 of yore, in war canoes. The author's account of San 

 Francisco and its Chinese quarter is hardly so interesting 

 as the earlier part of the book, as this quarter has been 

 done to death in so many books of travel, and after all 

 Chinese life at San Francisco is in all essentials identical 

 with Chinese life at home. Perhaps before many years 

 we shall have a Chinese quarter in London. 



The official account of the Pacific railroads, sold on the 

 line, " Williams' Pacific Tourist," which is got up in the 

 interests of the railroad companies, is verj- propeily de- 

 nounced by the author. It is, indeed a shameless puff of 

 the supposed beauties of the scenery- on the line of the 

 railroad, which exist for the most part only on paper and 

 in the fervent imagination of the writer. An account of 

 Salt Lake City and Niagara close Dr. Max Euchners 

 very pleasant volume. Some passages in the book are 

 rather free in their tone ; a case of midwifery on board 

 ship is described with needless detail ; many of the doings 

 of Polynesians are also described with little reserve. 



OUR BOOK SHELF 

 Index Medicus. A Monthly Classified Record of the 

 Medical Literature of the World. Compiled under the 

 Supervision of Dr. John S. Billings, Surgeon U.S. 

 Army, and Dr. Robert Fletcher, ^LR.C.S. Eng. (New 

 York, F. Leypoldt ; London, Triibner and Co.) 

 For some time back Dr. Billings, of the United States 

 Army, has been engaged in the preparation of an Index- 

 Catalogue of the library of the surgeon-general's office at 

 Washington. To those who do not understand what this 

 work is, this may not seem to be at all extraordinary, but 

 those who know that the work is really an universal 

 catalogue of medical literature, giving not only the names 

 of the authors, but the subjects of the papers which have 

 appeared in all medical periodicals throughout the world 

 from the time of their first issue until the present, will 

 be astonished that any man has had the courage to 

 undertake such a task, and still more to learn that the 

 MS. of this catalogue is now nearly ready for press, and 

 is only awaiting the authority of Congress to print it. 

 For the sake of medicine throughout the world we trust 

 that this authority will be granted without delay, for to 

 every man who has the interests of medicine at heart this 

 work will be an invaluable boon. It has been suggested 

 that such a catalogue should be supplemented by some 

 current publication, which should show all recent works, 

 together with articles and periodicals arranged by sub- 

 jects, and the present publication has been issued to 

 supply this want. 



"In its pages the practitioner will find tables of 

 parallels for his anomalous cases, accounts of new 

 remedies, and the latest methods in therapeutics. The 

 teacher will observe what is being written or taught by 

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 be enabled to add the latest views and cases to his forth- 

 coming work, or to discover where he has been antici- 

 pated by other writers ; and the publishers of medical 

 books and periodicals must necessarily profit by the 

 publicity given to their productions.'' 



