36 



NATURE 



[September io, 1914 



280,000 doses of the vaccine for the use of the Army. 

 Sir Almroth Wright, the author of anti-typhoid inocu- 

 lation, points out in the Times that it is already com- 

 pulsory in the French and American Armies, and he 

 urges that it should now be made so also in the 

 British Army. He states also that 180,000 doses of an 

 "anti-sepsis" vaccine have been supplied to our Army 

 and Navy, and also to the French military hospitals 

 during the past three weeks. It is believed that this 

 vaccine will be of great value in protecting our Army 

 from bacterial infection of wounds. 



A SUMMARY of the weather for the past summer as 

 comprised in the thirteen weeks ending August 29 has 

 been given by the Meteorological Office for all dis- 

 tricts of the United Kingdom. The mean temperature 

 for the summer is above the average in all parts of 

 the British Isles. The excess is greatest in the north 

 of Scotland and in the north and north-east of Eng- 

 land, where it amounts to about 1-5°, and in the east 

 and west of Scotland, the midland counties, and the 

 north-west of England the excess is 1°. In the 

 Channel Islands the excess of temperature is very 

 trifling. The south-east of England is the only dis- 

 trict in which the highest temperature has reached 90°. 

 The aggregate rainfall for the summer varies con- 

 siderably in different districts of the United Kingdom. 

 The highest excess of the summer fall is 125 per cent, 

 of the average in the south-west of England, in the 

 north-east of England, and in the midland counties the 

 fall is 112 per cent, of the average, and the Channel 

 Islands is the only other district with an excess, with 

 107 per cent, of the average. In the north of Scotland 

 the rainfall is only 71 per cent, of the average, and 

 78 per cent, in the west of Scotland and in the east 

 of England. In the south-east of England the summer 

 fall is 88 per cent, of the average. The duration of 

 bright sunshine is generally in excess of the average. 



Prof. O. Schlaginhaufen reviews the pygmy ques- 

 tion in New Guinea in the Festschrift der Dozenten 

 der Universitat Zurich, 1914, and in Melanesia in the 

 Arch. Suisses d'Anthrop., Geneva. 1914. He comes 

 to the conclusion that in Melanesia we know of only 

 one group which can be called pure pygmy, the 

 Tapiro of West Netherlands, New Guinea, with a 

 mean stature of 1449 cm., described by Wollaston 

 and Rawling. Then come four tribes, the Kamaweka 

 of the Mekeo district, British New Guinea, noted by 

 Seligmann, the Goliath group of Netherlands New- 

 Guinea, described by van den Broek, the Torricelli 

 group, and Kai of German New Guinea, described 

 by himself and Poch respectively, all with a mean 

 somewhere about 150 cm. These are often regarded 

 as a mixture between true pygmies and tall varieties, 

 but there is no proof of this. These five tribes in- 

 habit the hilly interior. For all groups studied in 

 New Guinea the general rule holds good that stature 

 increases from inland to the coast, and the cephalic 

 index (with some exceptions) decreases. The author 

 holds that this association points to these being less 

 racial characters than functions of geographical con- 

 trol. Dolichocephalism combined with low stature 

 has not yet been observed in New Guinea or the 

 Bismarck Archipelago. No distinct group of pygmies 

 NO. 2341, VOL. 94] 



have been found as yet in the Bismarck Archipelago 

 or the Solomon Islands, though very short people 

 occur sporadically. The author gives an interesting 

 coloured map showing the distributions of stature in 

 New Guinea and the Bismarck Archipelago. 



An illustrated account of a sixteenth-century building 

 at West Hoathly, Sussex, known as the Priest House, 

 which has been restored and fitted up as a museum 

 by Mr. Godwin King, appears in the Museums Journal 

 for September. Admirable as is the restoration, it 

 would have been better if the interior had been refitted 

 according to the original plan. This, it is suggested, 

 may, however, be indicated in a miniature model of 

 the building. 



In his presidential address at the annual meeting of 

 the new Zealand Institute (Proc, vol. xlvi.), Dr. C. 

 Chilton paid a well-deserved tribute to the services 

 rendered by the late Augustus Hamilton to that body, 

 and also to the Dominion Museum, of which he was 

 director. In a later part of the address the presi- 

 dent directed attention to the unsatisfactory housing 

 of the valuable specimens and the library of the 

 Institute in the Dominion Museum. The majority of 

 the specimens in portions of the collection — especially 

 the examples of Maori workmanship and art — are 

 irreplaceable, "yet they are still housed in a wooden 

 building that is almost falling to pieces through age, 

 and the greater part of which has been declared to be 

 insanitary for human beings." 



In vol. iii., part 3, of Records of the W. Australian 

 Museum, Mr. L, Glauert gives an account of new 

 discoveries of mammalian remains in the so-called 

 mammoth cave. The most interesting of these per- 

 tain to a big echidna, believed to have been double 

 the size of the living Australian Echidna aculeata, 

 and also exceeding in size any of the previously 

 described extinct forms, one of which has been re- 

 ferred to the genus Zaglossus, or Proechidna, now- 

 confined to New Guinea. The new specimens are, 

 however, considered to represent a still larger species, 

 for which the name Zaglossus hacketti is proposed. 

 In recording remains of the Tasmanian wolf and 

 Tasmanian devil from the same cavern, Mr. Glauert 

 incidentally mentions that an apparently wild in- 

 dividual of the latter species was killed near Melbourne 

 in 1912. 



In an admirably thought-out article on the 

 osteology of Permian reptiles, in No. 8 of vol. i. 

 of Contributions from Walker Museum, published 

 in this country by the Cambridge University Press, 

 as agents for the University of Chicago Press, 

 Mr. S. W. Williston gives certain very cogent reasons 

 for deposing the New Zealand tuatera (Sphenodon) 

 from its hitherto undisputed position as one of the most 

 primitive reptiles with which we are acquainted. As 

 the result of an elaborate study of the sjceleton of the 

 lizard-like Araeoscelis from the Permian of Texas, the 

 author has come to the conclusion that in the earliest 

 reptiles it is much more probable that the bony skull- 

 roof inherited from the stegocephalian amphibians 

 ! should have been perforated only once, rather than 

 [ twice, on each side, and consequently that the two 

 ' bony temporal arcades of the tuatera represent a more 



