March 24, 19 10] 



NA JURE 



i05 



memoirs on that coal-field, and on the country around 

 Derby, Burton-on-Trent, Atherstone, Charnwood Forest, 

 and Leicester. In 1901 he was promoted to be district 

 c;eologist, but retired from the public service in 1904, as 

 i weakness of the heart, which ultimately proved fatal, 

 rendered it necessary to give up the arduous work of a 

 field-geologist. His geological labours, represented by 

 official maps, sections and memoirs, and by papers com- 

 municated to scientific societies, bear evidence of the most 

 painstaking care and accuracy. While at Leicester Mr. 

 Fox-Strangways did much to promote local interest in 

 .,?ology, especially by conducting field-excursions, which 

 ere highly appreciated. 



According to a telegram from Paris in the Times of 

 March 13, an International Congress for the Study of 

 Cancer will be held in that city, under the patronage of 

 the President of the Republic, in the first week of October. 

 The assemblage will not be a congress in the true sense ; 

 its official title is " Second International Conference for 

 Cancer Research," the first meeting of the kind having 

 been held in Heidelberg in 1906, as the outcome of which 

 a sort of international association has developed. From 

 this association, however, British investigators have 

 hitherto held aloof, notwithstanding efforts that have been 

 made from Berlin to induce the Imperial Cancer Research 

 Fund — which is the national and representative body in 

 this country — to join. These efforts have taken the form 

 of questions addressed to the Prime Minister in the House 

 of Commons, and even went so far as the presentation of 

 a petition to the King during his visit to Berlin in 

 February, 1909. The German organisers of the so-called 

 international association have used their best efforts to 

 have the first International Congress on Cancer held in 

 London in 1910 ; but this proposal was discountenanced by 

 the director of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, Dr. 

 E. F. Bashford, and the executive committee, on the 

 ground that the time for such a congress had not yet 

 arrived. It was felt that such a congress held in London 

 under the auspices of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund, 

 backed as it is by the support of various Government 

 departments, the Royal Societ}', the Royal Colleges of 

 Physicians and Surgeons, and other public bodies, would 

 arouse too great expectations on the part of the public. 

 The programme for the forthcoming meeting in Paris 

 covers a wide range of subjects, but in the absence of the 

 names of those contributing papers it is too early to decide 

 what importance will attach to the assembly. The list of 

 office bearers given in the Times exhibits the remarkable 

 feature of not including a single name of an active worker 

 in those fields of cancer research which are the direct 

 contributors to the success attending the investigations of 

 the past ten years. However distinguished some of these 

 names are in the realms of practical medicine and surgery, 

 they add little, if any, weight to the purely scientific side 

 of an assembly called together to study so recondite a 

 problem as cancer. 



Dr. Luigi Perxier, under the title of " Vestigia di una 

 Citta Ellenica arcaica in Creta," has issued, through the 

 Istituto Lombardo di Scienza e Lettere, an account of a 

 summary examination of an early Greek city in Crete. 

 It is surrounded by walls of cyclopean masonry, now 

 partially ruined. Some inscribed stones and terra-cottas 

 were discovered, the most interesting find being a stele 

 representing a standing figure facing to the right, clad in 

 a tightly folded robe, and holding in the left hand some- 

 thing resembling the Egyptian .\nkh. The figure possibly 

 shows the influence of Minoan traditions, and the site 

 clearly deserves further detailed examination. 

 NO. 2108, VOL. 83] 



.Major Lamb, I.M.S., and Captain McKendrick, I. M.S., 

 detail certain observations on rabies in the Scientific 

 Memoirs of the Government of India (No. 36). They find 

 that when the " natural " virus is passed through dogs a 

 " fixed " virus is obtained just as with rabbits, and that 

 the structures known as " Negri bodies," while easily 

 demonstrable in the natural virus, cannot be found in the 

 fixed virus. In several cases, both in dogs and in rabbits, 

 a chronic form of rabies was observed, the chief symptom 

 of which was progressive emaciation. It is comparatively 

 easy to infect guinea-pigs and monkeys by subcutaneous 

 inoculation of the virus. As in monkeys the incubation 

 period is much prolonged when the inoculation is sub- 

 cutaneous, attempts were made to immunise these animals 

 with a single subcutaneous inoculation with a fixed virus, 

 but without success. No bacteriohtic properties towards 

 the virus could be detected in the serum of patients who 

 had undergone the anti-rabic treatment. 



Fisheries, Ireuxd, Sci. Invest., 190S, iv. (1910), is 

 devoted to an account, by Messrs. E. W. L. Holt and 

 L. W. Byrne, of the chimaeroid fishes of the .■\tlantic slope 

 off the west coast of Ireland. The most interesting of 

 these» is Rhinochimaera atlatitica, a long-beaked species 

 known by a single adult male captured at a depth of 

 between 670 and 770 fathoms, and certain egg-capsules 

 attributed to the same species, which was first named by 

 its describers in 1909. R. atlatitica belongs to a genus 

 otherwise represented by R. pacifica, distinguished by the 

 relative shortness of the base of the second dorsal fin. 

 The only .\tlantic chimaeroid with which R. atlantica 

 could be confounded is Harriotta raleighana of the 

 western Atlantic ; the largest of the four known specimens 

 of the latter is, however, not more than half the size of 

 the type of the former, which, in turn, is decidedly smaller 

 than its Pacific representative. Harriotta is also other- 

 wise distinguished. 



In the thirteenth quarterly report on the scientific work 

 of the Lancashire and Western Sea-fisheries, Mr. J. John- 

 stone refers to experiments carried out at Conwav in re- 

 gard to the cleansing of mussels from sewage-pollution. 

 By transplanting the mussels to pure water, about 90 per 

 cent, of the sewage-bacteria was eliminated, from which 

 it appears that it will be possible to render the polluted 

 molluscs of the Conway estuarj- fit for human consumption 

 at a comparatively small cost. In the fourteenth report 

 Mr. Johnstone dwells on the measurements of plaice which 

 have been made during the last two years, these relating 

 to something like 100,000 individual fish. These lead to 

 the provisional conclusion that, in spite of the enormous 

 numbers of under-sized fish taken by this method, the 

 6-inch trawl-mesh is not harmful to the plaice-fisher}'. 

 " The plaice are small and below the normal in ' condi- 

 tion ' because they are so abundant. If they could be 

 ' thinned out ' by transplantation it might be of advantage 

 to the fisheries in general to enforce the 7-inch mesh ; but 

 so long as they cannot be transplanted I do not think that 

 the use of the larger mesh would lead to any improve- 

 ment, and it would certainly diminish the takings of the 

 inshore fishermen." 



Various attempts have been made from time to time to 

 interpret the phenomena of sex-determination in accordance 

 with Mendelian principles. The problem is again attacked 

 by Mr. Geoffrey Smith in the first of his " Studies in the 

 Experimental .Analysis of Sex," published in the Quarterly 

 Journal of Microscopical Science for February. Some years 

 ago this investigator was led to formulate a Mendelian 

 interpretation of sex-inheritance as a result of his remark- 



