March 3, 19 10] 



NATURE 



17 



The death is announced of M. Philippe Thomas, the 

 eminent and enthusiastic geologist who did important 

 pioneer work in Tunis and Algeria. Born at Duerne 

 (Rhone) in 1843, he entered the veterinary school at Alfort 

 in i860, and became a prominent member of the French 

 army veterinary service, from which he retired about nine 

 years ago. From his earliest youth he was deeply 

 interested in geology, and when his official appointment 

 took him to Algeria he devoted his scanty leisure to the 

 study and collection of the rocks and fossils of that 

 country, and was especially eager in the search for evidence 

 of primitive man. During twenty years he published a 

 series of notes and papers on subjects ranging from man 

 and Tertiary vertebrates to the stratigraphy of the region. 

 In 1884 he was chosen by the Minister of Public Instruc- 

 tion to join the well-known scientific mission to Tunis as 

 one of the geologists, and there he had ample scope for 

 the exercise of his abilities. He discovered the immense 

 deposits of phosphatic chalk, which have subsequent^ 

 proved of so great economic importance to Tunis. He 

 amassed material for an exhaustive description of the 

 geology of the country, and his later years were occupied 

 with its preparation for publication. Unfortunately, only 

 two parts of this work appeared, and the third part, deal- 

 ing especially with the phosphatic deposits, remained un- 

 finished at the time of the author's death. 



A\ appreciative account of the scientific work of Mr. 

 Edward Saunders, F.R.S., who died, we regret to learn, 

 on February 6, in his sixty-second year, appears in the 

 March number of the Entomologist's Monthly Magazine, 

 of which he was an editor. From this notice we extract 

 the following particulars of Mr. Saunders's career : — 

 Edward Saunders devoted himself first to the Coleoptera, 

 but acquired also considerable familiarity with enfomolog}" 

 in general, and with several other of the " systematic " 

 sciences, such as botany and conchology. At the age of 

 sixteen he published a paper in the first volume of the 

 Entomologist's Monthly Magazine on Coleoptera at Lowe- 

 stoft, and was afterwards for some years mainly occupied in 

 studying the Buprestidae of the world. A succession of notes, 

 descriptions, revisions of particular collections, groups, &c., 

 bearing on this subject were communicated by him to the 

 Transactions of the Entomological Society from 1866 to 

 1869 ; in 1870 he published a " Catalogue of the Species 

 contained in the Genus .Buprestis, Linn.," and in 1871 his 

 *' Catalogus Buprestidarum Synonymicus et Systematicus, " 

 a work the importance of which was immediately recog- 

 nised. From 1872 to 1874 ^e continued his work on this 

 group, describing several new genera and more than a 

 hundred new species, and at the same time began to issue 

 a long series of notes on British Hemiptera, which were 

 followed in 1875-6 by a synopsis, in three parts, of the 

 British Hemiptera-Heteroptera, and this again by a large 

 illustrated volume, his well-known " Hemiptera-Hetero- 

 ptera of the British Isles," which was published in 1S92. 

 Concurrently with this important mass of work on two 

 distinct orders of insects he began to attack a third group, 

 the Aculeate Hymenoptera, to which he gradually trans- 

 ferred his chief attention. For the rest of his life the 

 Aculeates (especially the British species) became his favourite 

 study, and he ultimately became, not merely the foremost, 

 but, it may almost be said, the final authority upon the 

 latter. His grand work " The Hymenoptera-Aculeata of 

 the British Isles " (1896) is one of the few without which 

 no serious hymenopterist thinks his working library com- 

 plete. Saunders became a Fellow of the Entomological 

 Society in 1865, served as treasurer from 1880 to 1890, 

 and was a vice-president in no fewer than five sessions, 

 NO. 2105, VOL. 83] 



viz. in 1874, 1899, 1901, 1906, and 1907. Though he never 

 actually held the presidency, it is scarcely a secret that he 

 would more than once have been elected to it unanimously 

 if he could have been persuaded to accept a post the dut'es 

 of which he felt unequal (physically) to discharge so com- 

 pletely as he would have wished. He entered the Linnean 

 Society in 1869, and about that time contributed at least 

 three papers to its journal. Long after, in 1890, he pub- 

 lished in the same journal an exceedingly careful and 

 interesting paper on the tongues, &c., of bees, with beau- 

 tiful illustrations, drawn by his brother, Mr. G. S. 

 Saunders, from microscopic preparations made by Mr. 

 Enock. His election in 1902 to the honour of fellowship 

 in the Royal Society was not only highly gratifying to 

 himself and his personal friends, but to all who saw in 

 it a recognition of systematic entomology, treated as 

 Saunders treated it as no mere idle dilettantism, but a 

 genuine branch of science. 



One of the features of the fauna of continental Africa 

 is the absence of flying-foxes of the typical genus Pteropus, 

 this absence extending also to the island of Zanzibar. Orr 

 the other hand, representatives of these bats occur in 

 Madagascar and the Mascarene, Comoro, and Seychelles 

 group. Recently, specimens of a new species of flying-fox 

 have been obtained from the island of Pemba, w^hich lies 

 to the north of Zanzibar at a distance of only about 37J 

 miles from the mainland. That the genus should be 

 found so close to the African continent, and yet should 

 never have reached the same, is very remarkable, especially 

 when the long interval between the Comoros and Seychelles, 

 on the one hand, and the Andamans and Ceylon, on the 

 other, is borne in mind. The Pemba species, which is 

 described by Dr. P. Matschie in the Sitzungsberichte Ges. 

 naturfor. Freunde, Berlin, 1909, p. 482, belongs to the 

 short-nosed group of the genus distinguished as Spectrum, 

 and has been named Pteropus voeltzkowi. 



In vol. xxxii., part i., of Notes from the Leyden 

 Museum, Dr. F. A. Jentink describes a new bat from 

 Java, and at the same time proposes the name Chryso- 

 pteron for the Celebesian Cerivoula weberi and the new 

 species, which are regarded as constituting a genus by 

 themselves. The typical plantain-bats of the genus 

 Cerivoula (Kerivoula) are characterised by the normal 

 form of the upper canines and the tricuspid first pair of 

 lower incisors ; a second genus, Phoniscus, as represented 

 by P. atrox of Sumatra, differs by the elongation and 

 compression of the shaft of the upper camines and the 

 quadricuspid first lower incisors, while the new genus is 

 characterised by the presence of four cusps to both first 

 and second lower incisors. It may be pointed out that 

 Chrysopteron, which includes the Celebesian C. weberi and 

 the Javan C. bartelsi, is practically identical with the much 

 earlier name Chrysoptera. 



CoNsiDER.'iBLE interest attaches to two papers, by Mr. 

 Knud Andersen, in the January number of the Annals and 

 Magazine of Natural History on the African fruit-bats of 

 the Epomophorus group. Hitherto, with the exception of 

 Hypsignathus monstrosus, all these hats have been very 

 generally included in the single genus Epomophorus. The 

 author shows, however, that the Angolan E. anchietae, on 

 account of possessing i pairs of cheek-teeth (in place 

 of the usual |), the great width of the palate, and other 

 cranial characters, is entitled to rank as a genus by itself, 

 for which the name Plerotes is proposed, this genus being 

 intermediate between Rousettus (cheek-teeth |) and 

 Epomophorus. Next to Plerotes comes the genus Epomops, 

 as represented by E. franqueti and E. comptus, in which 



