July 7, 1898] 



NATURE 



221 



Mr. Glazebrook is to be congratulated on having pro- 

 duced an attractive and useful book. The only fault of 

 the sketch is that it is too small for the subject, but for 

 that the author is not responsible. And after all the time 

 has hardly yet come for a complete appreciation of 

 Maxwell's influence on modern science. A. Gray. 



FUNAFUTI. 



The Atoll of Funafuti, Ellice Group : its Zoology, Botany, 

 Ethnology, and General Structure, based on Collections 

 made by Mr. Charles Hedley of the Australian 

 Museum, Sydney, N.S. IV. (Memoirs Australian 

 Museum, Sydney, No. iii. Parts i-6, 1896-1898.) 

 T^HE Pacific Ocean is divided into basins by a series 

 ^ of island chains and submarine ridges. The most 

 conspicuous chain begins in Malaysia, crosses New 

 Guinea, and, sweeping round parallel to the eastern coast 

 of Australia, runs past New Caledonia and Lord Howe 

 Island to New Zealand. The islands of this chain all 

 rise from the Melanesian plateau, and they are con- 

 tinental both in structure and in the characters of their 

 recent and fossil faunas. Outside this series is another, 

 which Hedley calls the Marshall-Austral chain, including 

 the Ellice, Phoenix, Marshall, Gilbert and Samoan archi- 

 pelagoes, and perhaps represented still further to the 

 south-east by the great Patagonian platform that pro- 

 jects north-westward from the coast of South America. 

 Ail but one of the members of this chain are oceanic in 

 structure and inhabitants ; the exception is Samoa, where 

 the chain crosses the line of elevation that passes from 

 the Tonga Islands, through Samoa, and on northward 

 towards the Sandwich Islands. In the angle between 

 this line and that of the Austral-Marshall series is one of 

 the deep open basins of the Pacific. A belt of apparent 

 subsidence lies on each side of the Tonga-Sandwich line, 

 marked amongst other points by the decreasing size of 

 the atolls as the two belts are approached. It is the atolls 

 that border these two belts of subsidence that offer the 

 best chance of settling the great coral island controversy. 

 Funafuti, as one of the easternmost of the Ellice Islands, 

 is in as good a position for a test boring as could be 

 selected ; for it is near the depression between the Ellice 

 Archipelago and the Tonga-Sandwich Island line, and is 

 on the south slope of one of the deep open basins of the 

 Pacific. The mechanical difficulties, however, proved too 

 serious at the first attempt. But the expedition of 1896 

 was valuable not only from the lessons taught as to the 

 methods of boring in coral reefs, but as it afforded the 

 opportunity for a detailed study of the island. Captain 

 Feild worked out the submarine contour, and the 

 naturalists collected materials for a detailed study of the 

 fauna and ethnology. Monographs of various types of 

 Indo-Pacific islands are greatly to be desired before the 



; osed of the business in order to obtain more leisure for his studies and 

 arches. His entering at Gonville and Caius College in 1833 at the age of 

 \ . and his obtaining the fourth place in the mathematical tripos of 1837, 

 year of Griffin, Sylvester and Gregory, are better known facts. His 

 • ersity career, whatever else it may have done, apparently did not tend 

 iiake his earlier work more generally known, and he died in 1S41 without 

 l.v:^,'.'*'^'^"''*"^ recognition which was his due. That came later when 

 NSilUam Thomson (Lord Kelvin), who was the first to recognise the tre- 

 mendous importance of Green's work, obtained in 1850 the republication in 

 ' //<• j/c»Kr««/of the famous " Essay on the Application of Mathematical 

 lysis to the Theories of Electricity and Magnetism" \CrelU 40, 44. at 

 \ 1852, 1854)), originally published in 1828. 



NO. 1497, VOL. 58] 



primitive characters have been lost. We must therefore 

 welcome the valuable monograph on Funafuti, based on 

 the extensive and systematic collections of Mr. Hedley, 

 which have been promptly worked out by the officials 

 of the Sydney Museum. Six parts of the monograph 

 have been received, amounting to 368 pages, and illus- 

 trated by twenty-two plates. Mr. Hedley contributes a 

 general introduction, in which he clearly states the geo- 

 morphological position of the island, and describes its 

 geological structure and its people. It is interesting to 

 notice that, in spite of the slight depth reached by 

 boring in 1896, Mr. Hedley infers from the general 

 characters of the atoll that its structure supports the 

 Darwinian theory. Mr. Hedley also contributes a series 

 of most interesting notes to the other articles, and shows 

 in them that he is as competent a naturalist as he is a 

 keen collector. 



The second part begins the description of the fauna 

 with the account of the insects and Arachnida by 

 Mr. Rainbow, of the Crustacea and Echinodermata by 

 Mr. Whitelegge. The third part contains Mr. Waite's 

 report on all the Vertebrates except the birds, which are 

 described, by Mr. J. North in the first part, and also 

 some of the Alcyonaria and Enteropneusta. The accounts 

 of these two groups are concluded in the fourth part, which 

 also contains the report on the sponges. Mr. Hedley 

 himself contributes the ethnological section, which forms 

 the fifth part. The sixth section, the last we have received, 

 contains one of the contributions of most interest at 

 the present time— Mr. Whitelegge's account of the corals. 

 Mr. Hedley tells us that the chief impression the coral 

 reefs of the island made upon him was their poverty both 

 in individuals and species. More genera and species can 

 be collected, he tells us, in a single tide on the reefs of 

 Queensland, New Guinea and New Caledonia than 

 he could find at Funafuti in several weeks' search. 

 Nevertheless, Mr. Whitelegge finds forty-seven species 

 in Mr. Hedley's 170 specimens, and divides into distinct 

 species corals which Mr. Hedley had especially collected 

 to illustrate different forms of the same. But Mr. 

 Whitelegge only adds two new species, which for corals 

 is an unusual act of moderation. 



In a series of memoirs such as this, it is of course 

 inevitable that the standard varies. One factor that has 

 a marked influence on the merit of the articles is the 

 size of the group concerned. Mr. Waite's note on the 

 indigenous mammal is a complete monograph, and its 

 accuracy is apparently unimpeachable ; but when we 

 come to the sections on the Arthropods we find that Mr. 

 Rainbow has to describe all the insects, including repre- 

 sentatives of the orders Coleoptera, Hymenoptera, Lepid- 

 optera, Diptera, Hemiptera and Orthoptera, and also 

 that he has to describe the Arachnida. It is therefore 

 Mr. Rainbow's misfortune, not his fault, that his de- 

 terminations cannot hope for the same degree of finality 

 as those of his colleagues who deal with smaller groups. 

 But Mr. Rainbow's contribution is no less useful ; only it 

 must be judged as one of those preliminary descriptions 

 which record the general constituents of a fauna, and 

 thus sort it out ready for criticism and revision by the 

 specialists. The specialists are few and insects are many. 

 The specialist monographers cannot keep pace with the 

 collectors. Hence if the work had waited until the 



