March 28, 1878] 



NA TURE 



425 



Meteor 



As meteors are rarely seen by day, I write to inform you that 

 I observed one this morning, at exactly 10.20 a.m., not only in 

 broad daylight, but in bright sunshine. I only caught a hasty 

 glance of it as it was disappearing. It was in the eastern side 

 of the sky, descending towards a point in the horizon nearly due 

 north from us, at an angle of about 40°. As we are quite in the 

 country, it could not have been anything else than a meteor. I 

 found that two of our servants had seen it also, and described it 

 as having a tail, which I did not see. James Elliot 



Goldielands, near Hawick, March 25 



The Bermuda Lizard 



In his " Geographical Distribution of Animals " (Am. ed. ii. 

 p. 135), Mr. Wallace states, speaking of the Bermudas, that 

 * a common American lizard, Plestiodon longiroslris, is the only 

 land reptile found on the islands." 



Plestiodon longirostris is not a common American species. It 

 is peculiar to the larger islands of the Bermuda Archipelago. 

 It was described by Prof. E. D. Cope {Proceedings of the 

 Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, 1861, p. 313) from 

 Bermuda specimens. It has never been found elsewhere. Its 

 closest affinities are with a West African species. 



G. Brown Goode 



U.S. National Museum, Washington, January 21 



Landslip near Cork 



The village of Coachford, on the River Lee, sixteen miles 

 from Cork, has been the scene of a curious landslip, or sub- 

 sidence of soil. 



On Wednesday, the 13th inst., a man on his way to work, at 

 about eight o'clock a.m., on going along a path beside a dyke or 

 bank which separates two fields close to the village, noticed a 

 breach in the dyke which had not existed before ; and on going 

 to examine, found a deep hole in the earth about a yard in 

 diameter, the depth of which appeared to him to be about a 

 hundred feet, and at the bottom of which he heard the sound of 

 running water. From that time till six o'clock p. M. the hole 

 gradually increased in diameter by the falling in of the sides, 

 until it appeared as I saw it on Sunday, the 1 7th inst., a conical 

 cavity fifty to sixty feet in diameter and thirty to forty in depth. 



The soil is composed of gravel and sand, with a substratum 

 of limestone. 



The same thing has evidently taken place sevQfal times before 

 in the immediate vicinity of the above-mentioned cavity, as there 

 are no less than seven other similar depressions of various sizes 

 in the same piece of ground, but the formation of none of these 

 is remembered by even the oldest inhabitants of the place. 



I should mention that the fields between which the landslip 

 has taken place lie pretty high, and that the River Lee is about 

 half a mile distant. A belief has long existed in the village 

 that a stream, which is supposed to flow into the Lee, runs 

 beneath the place, at some depth underground. 



Cork, March 20 C. J. Cooke 



JOACHIM JOHN MONTEIKO 



A FEW days ago (NATURE, vol. xvii. p. 391) we 

 recorded the melancholy fact of the death of this 

 enterprising African traveller. We have since been 

 favoured with a few particulars of his life and labours, 

 which appear to us to demand more than a passing word 

 of recognition. His work on "Angola and the River 

 Congo" (Macmillan, 1875) is still fresh in the mind of the 

 public, and has been made doubly interesting through the 

 recent travels of Mr. Stanley. Mr. Monteiro commenced 

 his scientific education at the Royal School of Mines, 

 under the late Sir H. De la Beche, and at the College of 

 Chemistry under Dr. Hoffmann, at both of which places 

 he obtained first-class honours. His first visit to Angola 

 was in the year 1858, when he went to work the Malachite 

 deposits at Bembe, in that province, and also the blue 

 carbonate of copper. This obtained honourable mention 

 in the International Exhibition of 1862. It was while 

 working these deposits at Bembe that the King of Congo 

 came down to pay a visit, and was received with all 



honours. A very curious letter from this king, asking for 

 a " piece of soap to wash his clothes with," is now in the 

 possession of the British Museum. 



It was during his stay at Bembe, and while exploring 

 the country round, that he discovered that the fibre of the 

 Adansonia di^itata was so valuable for the purposes of 

 making paper, but it was not until 1865 that he returned 

 to the coast for the purpose of developing this extra- 

 ordinary discovery. He continued to work this enter- 

 prise for many years, so as to fully establish the claim 

 of this fibre to being the most valuable natural pro- 

 duct for paper-making. Paper made exclusively of this 

 fibre is scarcely to be distinguished from parchment, 

 and it is owing to this remarkable quality that a small 

 percentage of the fibre enables the manufacturer to utilise 

 substances which would be otherwise useless. While 

 at Bembe Mr. Monteiro procured some of the most 

 interesting birds, and although the results of his first 

 collecting were perhaps not so important in regard to 

 novelties as those made later on, the value of this, our 

 first contribution to the avifauna of Inner Angola, will 

 never be underrated by ornithologists. In September, 

 1866, he accompanied Mr. A. A. Silva, the United States 

 Consul, on an ascent of the River Quanza for the purpose 

 of opening up the country to trade, and the natives were 

 greatly astonished at their first experience of a " smoke- 

 vessel." In April, 1873, he had the brothers Grandy as 

 his guests at Ambriz, and supplied them with beads and 

 goods for the arduous undertaking assigned to them by 

 the Royal Geographical Society, of endeavouring to dis- 

 cover the sources of the River Congo, and of aiding 

 Livingstone should he cross the continent and make foi 

 the West Coast. Mr. Monteiro accompanied the brothers 

 Grandy five days inland. He explored the Congo as far 

 as Porto da Lenho, in a steamer belonging to a Dutch 

 house at the mouth of the river ; and it was while on this 

 expedition that he met by appointment, and at their 

 desire, nine kings of Boma, whose curiosity he greatly 

 excited by being the owner, as they said, of the first 

 white woman, his wife, they had ever seen, and from her 

 hand the kings were greatly pleased to receive a " dash " 

 or present. 



Mr. Monteiro was honoured with the friendship of Dr. 

 Livingstone, who strongly desired him to accompany his 

 expedition as mineralogist, but this wish he could not 

 accede to, owing to his engagements in working out the 

 fibre-scheme on the West Coast. His researches in the 

 natural history of Angola have been of great importance 

 to science. Among the many botanical specimens which 

 he forwarded to England may be mentioned the plant 

 and flowers of WelwitscJiia tnirabilis, from which Sir 

 Joseph Hooker was enabled to compile his splendid 

 monograph of this extraordinary plant ; besides many 

 parasites, orchids, &c., which have been named after 

 him. Perhaps the most interesting animal discovered by 

 him was the beautiful Uttle lemur {Galago monteiri), and 

 the well-known chimpanzee, " Joe," which lived so long 

 in the Zoological Gardens, was also brought to England 

 by him. His second collection of birds was described by 

 Dr. Hartlaub in 1865, and contained many new species, 

 the most interesting of which were a Hornbill {Tockus 

 monteiri) and a Bustard {Otis picturata), while he also 

 procured a living specimen of the splendid Plantain-eater 

 {Corythaix livingstonii) discovered by Dr. Livingstone in 

 the Zambesi country. 



Mr. Monteiro's eighth, and, as it has unfortunately 

 proved, his last, visit to Africa, was one to Delagoa Bay, 

 and here he expired, after a severe illness, on the 6th of 

 January last. In company with his wife, who contributed 

 so largely to his natural history collections, at which she 

 worked with equal courage and zeal, he had set himself to 

 develop the mineral and natural products of that Portu- 

 guese possession, and had already sent to England many 

 valuable specimens, when his untimely death put an end 



