244 



NATURE 



[November 29, 1917 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 

 [The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 

 opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 

 can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 

 the writers of, rejected manuscripts intended for 

 this or any other part of Nature. No notice is 

 taken of anonymous communications.] 



"Fascination" of Birds by a Snake. 



I HAVE just received the following record of an ob- 

 servation made on SeptembeT- 19 by Capt. G. D. H. 

 Carpenter, at Itigi, about 150 miles east of Tabora, on 

 the Central Railway of late German East Africa. 

 Capt. Carpenter's account recalls the behaviour of 

 small birds to a cuckoo or an owl, and suggests that 

 they were "mobbing" an enemy rather than fas- 

 cinated by it. The observation may supply the clue to 

 the interpretation of all cases of supposed " fascina- 

 tion " by snakes. Edward B. Poulton. 



Oxford, November 24. 



" Yesterday afternoon I witnessed what I have always 

 found difficult to believe, namely, the srrange ' fascina- 

 tion ' of birds by a snake. I came upon a party of 

 very pretty little finches hopping about among thick 

 dead twigs of a fallen branch on the ground. I came 

 on them quite suddenly ifrom round another bush, 

 and stopped dead when I saw them to watch them. 

 Though I was within a couple of yards they did not 

 f!y away, but continued to hop about, all gradually 

 coming closer and uttering faint chirps. I thought I 

 had never seen such tame birds, and admired their 

 beauty. While looking at the birds I quite missed an 

 Elapine snake, which suddenly attracted my attention 

 by striking at a hen finch just in front of me! It 

 fluttered back a foot or two, and the snake got a 

 mouthful of feathers among its teeth, which seemed 

 to incommode it, for it went down among the thin 

 grass at the foot of the clump of twigs, where I could 

 still see it. The birds none of them made any attempt 

 to get away, but actually several of them, including 

 the one already struck at, hopped further down to get 

 another look at the snake ! The latter bird did show 

 some signs of agitation, as every now and then she 

 spread out her tail fanwise and kept on chirping, but 

 still went nearer. However, after a bit the birds flew 

 away one by one, without any excitement, and I crept 

 up and found the snake had gone. I wished I had 

 seen the snake before it struck, to. see which way its 

 head was pointing. Of course, I do not believe in the 

 mesmeric theory, but it was not a question of a snake 

 pursuing a victim which was too frightened to run 

 away." 



present require ; the shape and slope of the record line 

 give the furnaceman a power of anticipating the tem- 

 perature change which will take place in his furnace 



Pyrometers and Pyrometry. 



I DESIRE to compliment you on the summary in 

 Nature of November 15 of the recent meeting of the 

 Faraday Society on pyrometers and pyrometry; it is 

 quite the best of the various summaries and accounts 

 published in the technical Press. 



With reference to the question of automatic control, 

 I think it is only fair to the English pyrometer manu- 

 facturers to say that methods of the kind described by. 

 Mr. R. P. Brown, of Philadelphia, have been employed 

 previously, using instruments'of English manufacture. 

 In my judgment the present position is rather tljat 

 the instrument manufacturer is waiting on the furnace 

 user. Heating processes, in the majority of cases, are 

 not so far developed towards standardisation as to make; 

 any very extensive call for this automatic control. ln>^ 

 the majority of cases an ordinary recording pyrometer, 

 producing its record under the observation of the man 

 controlling the furnace, achieves all that industries at 

 NO. 2509, VOL. 100] 



md of altering the firing accordingly 



HAS. E. Foster. 



Letchworth, Herts, November 19. 



IRON-ORE DEPOSITS IN RELATION TO 

 THE WAR. 



THE Fortnightly Review for November con- 

 tains an important article headed " Coal and 

 Iron in War : The Importance of Alsace and 

 Lorraine," which sets forth very clearly an aspect 

 of the European war that has received far too 

 little attention in this country, though its import- 

 ance has been for some time fully recog-nised on 

 the Continent. The article consists essentially of 

 a statement as to one of the main causes of the 

 origin of the war, and of a deduction showing the 

 proper nature of the penalty that should be exacted 

 from the originators. The contributory cause dis- 

 cussed is the intense desire of the German pluto- 

 cratic group, the great German ironmasters, of 

 which such firms as Krupp and the Deutscher 

 Kaiser are representative, to obtain a monopoly 

 of that vast deposit of iron ore which covers 

 so large an area of Central Europe, and is 

 known as "Minette. " The writer in the Fort- 

 nightly Review rests his presentation of the case 

 very largely upon the strong evidence contained 

 in a memorandum submitted on May 20, 191 5, 

 by the six leading industrial and agricultural 

 societies of Germany to the Chancellor, in which 

 their requirements and demands in regard to the 

 terms of peace are set forth. The most important 

 of these in the present connection is the demand 

 that Germany should retain possession of the 

 French coast region as far as the Somme, because 

 "by the acquisition of the line of the Meuse and 

 of the French coast the iron-producing district of 

 Briey, as well as the coal-fields of the north and 

 of the Pas de Calais, would be acquired." 



The Fortnightly Review has done valuable 

 service to the nation in directing attention to this 

 memorandum ; if any evidence at all were needed 

 to show that Germany was not forced into this 

 war for self-defence, as Germans are so fond of 

 alleging, but went into it deliberately for the sake 

 of rapine and plunder, this document supplies it to 

 the full, seeing that it specifies in detail the booty 

 of which Germany was deliberately preparing to 

 rob her neighbour, an act of robbery which would 

 certainly have been consummated but for British 

 intervention. The facts as to the importance of the 

 Minette ores are well enough shown in the article 

 referred to, but a full knowledge of all the circum- 

 stances makes the case even stronger. In the year 

 191 1 a full account of the Minette iron-ore deposits 

 appeared in the well-known German paper Stahl 

 und Eisen, the figures given In which are most 

 illuminating. It is stated that the area within 

 which these ores are workable covers 70,000 to 

 80,000 hectares, of which French Lorraine pos- 

 sesses 40,000 to 50,000, German Lorraine 27,000 

 to 28,000, Luxemburg 2500, ar 1 Belgium only a 



