50 



NATURE 



[September 20, 191 7 



ical Journal for September (vol. 1., No. 3). From the 

 Lado Enclave north-westward to about lat. 7" N. the 

 divide proves to be a continuous and more or less level 

 strip of high country, covered with open savanna and in 

 places as much as two miles in width. The fact that 

 it is level and continuous makes this watershed im- 

 portant as a possible railway route, provided only that 

 the unexplored northern part proves to have the same 

 nature as the southern part. There is an ample water 

 supply and plenty of good timber along the route. 

 Major Christy suggests that a line should be built 

 from El Fasher in Darfur, to which the Khartoum-El 

 Obeid line is now being extended, along the Congo- 

 Nile watershed to the Nile at Redjaf or Wadelai, and 

 thence by the rift valley to Lake Tanganyika. This 

 would be a longer tut more practical route between 

 Egypt and the lake region than the old project, which 

 would entail almost insuperable difficulties in the sudd 

 regions of the middle Nile. The map accompanying 

 the paper is based on a prismatic compass traverse. 

 No astronomical observations were taken. 



It is announced by the Titnes that Sir Arthur Steel- 

 Maitland, Under-Secretary for the Colonies, will 

 be the Parliamentary Secretary of the new de- 

 partment which is being created to improve our 

 commercial intelligence svstem, and that his successor 

 at the Colonial Office"^ will be Mr. W. A. S. 

 Hewins. The Commercial Intelligence Department 

 will eventually comprise the existing Department of 

 Commercial Intelligence of the Board of Trade and the 

 Foreign Trade Department of the Foreign Office, and 

 will take over such of the staff and records of the War 

 Trade Intelligence and Statistical Departments as may 

 be available and required. The official head of the 

 department will be an officer appointed jointly by the 

 President of the Board of Trade and the Secretary of 

 State for Foreign Affairs, working under the new Par- 

 liamentary Secretary. The appointment and control of 

 the Trade Commissioners within the Empire will, as 

 at present, rest with the Board of Trade, and the 

 appointment and control of the Commercial Attaches 

 and Consular Service with the Foreign Office, but the 

 work of the new department will comprise all matters 

 dealing with commercial intelligence, and, so far as is 

 necessary for that purpose, it will give directions to the 

 oversea services and make the necessary arrangements 

 for keeping them in close touch with the commercial 

 classes In this country. The department will be assisted 

 by an Advisory Committee of business men, and it is 

 hoped that it will be possible to arrange for a sub- 

 committee of this committee co meet at frequent in- 

 tervals in order to advise the department on its current 

 work. 



A CORRESPONDENT of the Pioneer Mail of August 11 

 shows that there are still some unexplored byways in 

 the study of the animals of India. The lion is believed 

 to be now confined to the Gir forest of Kathiawar, but 

 news has been received of the discovery of the skin of 

 an animal supposed to be a lion in Assam. In the 

 Khasia Hills there were said to be animals like small 

 pigs, but with feet like dogs. These have now turned 

 out to be badgers. The one-horned sheep of Nepal 

 was at one time regarded as fabulous, but ten years ago 

 it was found to be a fact, and the writer states that he 

 possessed two specimens, one of which was sent to 

 the experimental farm at Shillong, where it probablv 

 may still be examined. 



The_ alertness of the United States Bureau of 

 Fisheries and the thoroughness of its operations are 

 well illustrated in the issue of California Fish and 

 Game for July, where Mr. J. N. Cobb directs attention 

 to the wholesale waste of fishery products v^-hich could 

 well be turned to profit. In the salmon fisheries of the 



Pacific coast, he remarks, 140,000,000 salmon wen 

 taken during 1913. The preparation of these lish fo 

 the market resulted in the loss, in the form of offal, 

 of no fewer than 101,186 tons, all of which could ha\i 

 been "worked up into merchantable products." Mil 

 lions of pounds of salmon eggs, now run to waste, 

 could, he insists, be converted into caviare. In Siberia 

 during this year no fewer than 259 tons of such eggs 

 were thus prepared, as against 24,000 lb. on the Pacific 

 coast of America. The rest of the offal, he suggests, 

 should be converted into fertiliser and oil. Alaska 

 harbours enormous numbers of trout, representing four 

 species, all of which could be canned, as are the salmon 

 further south. No less neglected, he shows, are vari- 

 ous species of the Mollusca and Crustacea. He also 

 advocates the use of whale meat and the skins of hair 

 seals for leather.' Finally, he points out, there are 

 great possibilities for the use of the various kinds of 

 seaweed. These we in this country could also profit- 

 ably adopt. 



The gipsy moth, Porthetria dispar, was accidentally 

 introduced from Europe into Massachusetts in 1868, 

 and is now widely spread throughout eastern New 

 England, where the caterpillars annually defoliate and 

 kill many broad- leaved trees. The State of Massa- 

 chusetts has spent more than 1,000,000 dollars in 

 unsuccessful efforts to exterminate this pest, which 

 does so much damage to shade and fruit trees. It has 

 lately invaded the forests, attacking especially oak, 

 aspen, poplar, beech, lime, and birch. It is impos- 

 sible, on account of the expense, to have recourse in 

 the forests to the spraying methods which are useful 

 in orchards and city avenues. Messrs, G. E. Clement 

 and Willis Munro, in U.S. Dept. of Agriculture 

 Bulletin, No. 484, give the results of their investiga- 

 tions as regards the liability of the various forest trees 

 to attack, and propose certain measures of defence, 

 which depend mainly on the elimination by felling of 

 species sought after by the larvae, and on the cutting 

 of dead and dying trees generally. In this region 

 Ihe problem is complicated by the presence of two 

 other exotic plagues, the chestnut-bark disease, sup- 

 posed to have been introduced from Japan, and the 

 white pine blister rust, which was imported with 

 nursery stock from Germany. These two fungoid 

 diseases are so senous as to endanger the contmued 

 existence in the United States of two valuable timber 

 trees, the chestnut and the white pine. 



The seat of the olfactory sense in spiders, hitherto 

 a matter of speculation, seems to have been determined, 

 at least in the trap-door spiders, by Mr. John Hewitt, 

 who describes his investigations on living spiders in the 

 Sonth African Journal of Science for March, wliich has 

 just reached us. From Mr. Hewitt's experiments with 

 scent-tipped rods there appears to be no doubt 

 that this sense is located in the feet, and more directly, 

 perhaps, in the " scopula "• — the pad of fine and speci- 

 ally modified hairs seated on the lower and lateral sur- 

 faces of the tarsi. Whether females lack this sense 

 or not is a matter for conjecture. At any rate, they 

 do not respond to the tests which so readily stimulate 

 the males into action The author suggests that it is 

 by the sense of smell that the males find their mates. 

 If thfs be so, then it would appear that the females 

 remain odourless during their periods of sexual in- 

 activity, for males used in these experiments showed 

 no sign of response when placed near females. W'hen 

 placed on a tablecloth having a woolly surface males 

 at once adopted the characteristic courting attitude, 

 the appropriate movements being apparently stimulated 

 by the likeness of the fibres of the cloth to the threads 

 set free by the female in her immediate neighbourhood 

 when desirous of mating, at which time the male also 



NO. 2499, VOL. 100] 



