45« 



NATURE 



[December 24, 1914 



pride that I record that I never heard him utter a ; 

 word to which the gentlest woman could object, and j 

 that I have never found him unequal to any kind of ! 

 emergency." \ 



In the American Museum Journal for October- j 

 November Mr. G. G. MacCurdy, under the title of | 

 " Palaeolithic Art as Represented in the Collections of ! 

 the American Museum of Natural History'," describes j 

 a number of objects acquired in France in 19 12 by j 

 Prof. H. F. Osborn and the author. Among the most j 

 interesting specimens are a series of the tallies, or 

 marques de chasses, which have been interpreted as 

 records of their " kills " by the Aurignacian hunters ; 

 a set of perforated teeth, and shells of the Middle 

 Aurignacian period from the Abri Blanchard, Dor- 

 dogne ; a holed limestone fragment, of which the 

 utilitv is uncertain, it may have been used as a 

 weight ; figures of a horse engraved on stone of the 

 Upper Aurignacian period from Roches-de-Sergeac, 

 Dordogne, and of a reindeer on bone from Limeuil. 



The custom of cross-cousin marriage in South India, 

 recently discussed by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, is further 

 considered by Mr. F. J. Richards in the December 

 issue of Man. He arrives at the conclusion that it is 

 based on economic considerations, and, in particular, 

 on the mode of transmission of famity property. The 

 Dravidian people follow the rule of matrilinear suc- 

 cession. They subsequently came under the influence 

 of the intrusive Brahmanical culture, in which the 

 rule of patrilinear succession is followed. The effect 

 of this clash of rival cultures was the desire of the 

 matrilinear community to secure the advantages of 

 patrilinear transmission of the estate ; that is to say, 

 the natural desire of the father to provide for his 

 ofTspring might be secured by insisting that a man 

 should marry the daughter of his maternal uncle, of 

 his paternal aunt, or of his sister. This arrangement 

 would enable a matrilinear community to conform to 

 the patrilinear system of inheritance without fear of 

 dissipating the familv property, which is dependent on 

 inheritance on matrilinear lines. The present practice 

 of cross-cousin marriage is thus a compromise between 

 the Dravidian rule of succession through the mother 

 and the Brahmanical rule of succession through the 

 father. 



Nearly the whole of part 6 of the tenth volume of 

 Records of the Indian Museum is devoted to an 

 account of fresh-water and terrestrial oligochaetous 

 worms, mainly collected in northern India, with de- 

 scriptions of a number of new species. The author. 

 Dr. J. Stephenson, of the Lahore College, remarks 

 that the most noteworthy item is the occurrence of 

 Microscolex phosphoreus (a widely spread species, 

 the original home of which was probably in tem- 

 perate South America), near Peshawar, at a distance 

 of 700 miles from the sea. Although the dispersal 

 from its original home across the iVtlantic and 

 Indian Oceans w'as doubtless due to the preva- 

 lent westerly winds, transport by human agency seems 

 the onlv explanation of its isolated occurrence in the 

 heart of northern India. 



The Aarsberetning of the Bergen Museum for 1913 

 and the first half of 19 14 records steady progress in 

 NO. 2 ^=^6, VOL. Q4I 



all departments during the period under review, a 

 satisfactory incident being the bequest of 7000 kr. 

 for general purposes. Numerous additions to 

 the exhibited series of mammals and birds were 

 made, but, judging from some of the figures in the 

 text, there appears room for much improvement in 

 the method of taxidermy. Ocean-surveying and the 

 work of biological stations were carried on with great: 

 energy, reports from no fewer than forty-three station^ 

 being quoted. The contour of the channels of many 

 of the Norwegian fjords is illustrated by a transverse 

 section of the Sognefjord, in which the sudden descent 

 of the sides and the great depth of the middle are 

 w^ell shown. 



Dr. W. Si^ren'SEN has published in French an im- 

 portant paper {Kgl. Danske Videnskab. Selskabs 

 Forhandlinger, 19 14, No. 3), on the anatomy of the 

 Solifugida, that remarkable order of Arachnida which 

 has attracted many zoologists to its study and 

 which formed the subject of a lengthy memoir by the 

 late H. M. Bernard (Trans. Linn. Soc. Zool., 2 ser., 

 vol. vi.). The author criticises Bernard's work with 

 some severity, pointing out that the latter's belief in 

 the poisonous nature of the Solifugida is unsupported 

 by facts, and that the structures designated by him 

 as "coxal glands" have no openings on the haunches 

 of the foremost legs, but terminate on short processes 

 situated on the dorsal aspect of the appendages of the 

 second pair. These appendages are termed " mandi- 

 bules " by S0rensen. Considering the anterior posi- 

 tion of the excretory organs under discussion, S0ren- 

 sen's comparison of them with the Malpighian tubes 

 of insects, which are outgrowths of the hind-gut, 

 must remain open to question. 



In a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Imperial 

 Botanic Garden of Petrograd (vol. xiii., No. 4), 

 G. A. Nadson describes a number of interesting 

 sulphur bacteria from brackish water in the Gulf of 

 Finland. Two of the forms described are peculiar 

 from the fact that the cells contain in addition to 

 stored sulphur a substance which readily decomposes 

 into oxalic acid; these bacteria live in badly aerated 

 mud, and by increasing the oxygen supply the oxalite- 

 like substance was found to increase, and the accumu- 

 lation of sulphur to diminish, and vice versa. A 

 remarkable new genus of sulphur bacteria, called 

 Thiosphaerella, was discovered, which contained in 

 its cells large quantities of a starch-like substance; 

 the other forms described are new species of the 

 genera Achromatium and Thiophysa. 



In a paper which appeared in the Annals of Botany 

 (vol. xxviii., No. cxii.) and of which we have received 

 a reprint, Mr. S. R. Price describes some results 

 obtained in the study of plant cells by the method 

 of dark-ground illumination, a method hitherto but 

 little used in botanical work. The method often 

 reveals new structural features and is useful in 

 establishing the presence of particles which are 

 difficult to see or which are unresolved in direct 

 illumination, but is very restricted in application on 

 account of the difificulty of selecting suitable material 

 for examination. Some of the author's observations 

 indicate possible lines of work rather than completed 



