49^ 



JV'A TURE 



[September 23, 1897 



The Chlorination Process. By E. B. Wilson, E.M. 



Pp. iv + 125. (New York : John Wiley and Sons. 



London : Chapman and Hall, Ltd., 1897.) 

 This little volume bears a strong family resemblance to 

 the book on " Cyanide Processes," by the same author, 

 which has already been reviewed in Nature. An 

 engineer who has not studied chemistry so much as 

 other subjects naturally encounters difficulties in de- 

 scribing a "wet" or so-called chemical process. For 

 example, on p. 61, the equation representing the form- 

 ation of gold chloride in cases where bleaching powder 

 is used is given as follows : 



Au -1- CaOClj -f H2SO4 = AuCIs + CaSO., + H^O. 

 It is stated further on that "the chlorination process is 

 based upon this reaction." If such opinions are not 

 counted, there is not much that is new in the volume. 



LETTERS TO THE t.DlTOR. 



{The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed 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.'^ 



African Language. 

 In an exceedingly interesting article in your issue of the i6th, 

 on ' 'Anthropology versus Etymology," I am so much struck by the 

 clear statement ot the old school mytholbgist dogma, that " the 

 old name of a deity which had lost its meaning might remind a 

 later generation of the name of some beast ; hence might 

 arise those stories of gods taking the forms of beasts," ike. 

 That this is really the case among certain West African tribes I 

 am quite certain, and I believe that, as far as West Africa goes, 

 the confusion caused in white minds by the language has given 

 rise to a good deal that has been said regarding the West 

 African natives believing themselves descendants of animals. 

 It is, I need hardly say, no uncommon thing to find one and the 

 same word used for two or more distinct things. When that 

 word is written down by a white man, who may not notice the 

 accompanying gesture, that marks in which relation it is em - 

 ployed, error is liable to creep in, and you may be calling 

 •'slowness in walking" "the new leaves on trees," or vice 

 versa, or "a hundred bundles of bikei" "the butt-end of a 

 log," or, "a finger-snap" "your maternal aunt" among the 

 Balanh. This also shows as an element of the danger of 

 judging from words alone in the case ot the name used by all 

 the Fjort tribe, who are under the Nkissi school of fetish, for 

 their great over- lord of gods, Nzambi Mpungu. In the Loango 

 and Kacongo districts Mpungu means a great ape, and the word 

 is used there also as the name for this great god, the creating 

 god ; hence it would be easy, and I hope excusable, for I did it 

 at first myself, to think the great god and the ape had some 

 connection. Nevertheless, they have not Nzambi Mpungu as 

 a name, for the great deity was imported into the Kacongo and 

 Loango from a region on the south bank of the Congo, with 

 the rest of the Nkissi cult, prior to the discovery of these regions 

 by Diego Cao ; and therefore, when the word is used in "a re- 

 ligious sense, it bears the religious meaning which it brought 

 from its original home, namely, something that is above, or 

 that covers over. Mr. R. E. Dennett tells me that Mpungu is 

 used in this sense to this day in the Nlanoi dialects. 



The truth is, we are now urgently in need of a Prof. Max 

 Miiller for African languages. When attempting to grasp the 

 underlying idea of witch-doctors' methods at Okiyon (among 

 true negroes, I found an alarming state of affairs connected with 

 the so-called word woka. The only thing I can liken woka to 

 is a nest of spiders, which as soon as you touch it with a stick 

 ceases to be a manageable affair ; in woka there are repre- 

 sentations of at least three sets of opinions bearing on the inter- 

 relationships of matter and spirit. I subsequently found ample 

 reason to believe that this was the case with all secret society 

 words ; namely, that they were words the full meaning of which 

 were only known to the initiated. The ordinary free man or 

 woman passing through the ordinary course of secret society 

 instruction would only learn the signification of a simple set 

 of them. The full meaning of the strong words are only 

 known to the few men at ttie head of the society. Having 

 grasped this state of affairs I decided to stick to fishing and the 

 NO. 1456, VOL. 56] 



land law, hoping that this mystery was confined to the strong 

 mouth ; but a few months ago, I having requested Mr. Dennett, 

 of Loango, to send up some of the interesting stories I knew 

 were prevalent among the Fjort tnbe, among whom he has lived 

 for seventeen years continuously, he sent me what he calls 

 " the key to the Fjort alphabet," which shows me this strange 

 figurative unworked-at thing lays behind the whole of that lan- 

 guage. I have no hesitation in saying Mr. Dennett's MS. is a 

 most appalling work, and it produces great irritation in most 

 patient anthropologists promptly ; and what we now require, as 

 aforesaid, is that Max Miiller who will give the student of the 

 African great assistance, and then we will hope some great 

 philosopher will come and enable us to have anthropology cu>// 

 etymology and any other ology that will help us to know the 

 whole truth. M. H. KiNGSLEY. 



100 Addison Road, Kensington, W. , September 19. 



On Augury from Combat of Shell-fish. 



In your issue of May 13 (p. 30), Mr. Kumagusu Minakata. 

 quotes several examples of augury from the combat of shell- 

 fish. In Spencer St. John's " Life in the Forests of the Far 

 East," vol. i. p. 77, amongst various ordeals related by him as 

 being practised by the Sea-Dyaks of Sarawak, he gives the 

 following : — " Another is with two land shells, which are put on 

 a plate and lime-juice squeezed upon them, and the one that 

 moved first shows the guilt or innocence of the owner, according 

 as they have settled previously whether motion or rest is to 

 prove the case." Chas. A. Silberrad. 



Etawah, N.W.P., India, August 21. 



T/TE MEUDON ASTROPHYSICAL 

 OBSERVATORY.^ 



THE foundation of this national observatory may be 

 said to date from the time of the return of the 

 French expedition which was sent to Japan to observe 

 the transit of Venus in the year 1874. Since that period 

 the observatory has been content to publish many of the 

 important results of work completed in various journals,, 

 chiefly in the Coinples rendiis, but it is only quite recently 

 that the first of a series of " Annals" has appeared. It is 

 this volume which we propose now to pass under review ;. 

 but we may preface our remarks by reminding the reader 

 that many of the sections inserted are not published here 

 for the first time, especially those relating to the photo- 

 graphy of solar surface details. 



M. Janssen opens with a most interesting historical 

 introduction, which sums up the steps which led'to the 

 present efficient state of this national observatory, the 

 line of work which has been actively pursued since its 

 foundation, and the instrumental equipment which it 

 now possesses. Neither does he forget to refer to the 

 important role played by M. Cezanne, an eminent en- 

 gineer and the principal originator of the French Alpine 

 Club, in proposing and strongly advocating, before a 

 meeting of the National Assembly, the necessity of 

 establishing, near Paris, an observatory for the pursuit of 

 physical astronomy. The suggestion was in due course 

 submitted to the Academy of Sciences, and the com- 

 mittee appointed to inquire into it thoroughly endorsed 

 the advisability of the scheme. It was pointed out that 

 such an institution was not only useful, but necessary and 

 urgent ; that the part taken by France in these new 

 studies, their importance, and the novelty of the methods 

 on which they were founded, made them a new and 

 distinct branch of astronomy, and called for a special 

 establishment, where they could be freely cultivated. 

 Strengthened by the discovery of spectrum analysis and 

 photography, physical astronomy became a branch of 

 astronomy of sufficient importance to be pursued with 

 success and developed by itself. 



The necessity for the establishment of the institution 

 being thus strongly stated, it was not long before an 

 observatory was provisionally installed at the Boulevard 



1 " Annates de I'Observatoire d'Astronomie Physique de Paris," par J. 

 Janssen. Tome I. (Paris : Gauthier-Villars et Fils, i8g6.) 



