492 



NATURE 



[June 



1910 



journey) is being made by the Anglo-Egyptian authori- 

 ties to erase the name of Fashoda from the map and 

 to call it instead Kodok. But the earlier and more 

 picturesque name seems likely to survive, and the 

 place itself (according to the author) is distinctly 

 going ahead in spite of its evil reputation for malaria. 

 On p. 286 the author gives an interesting account of 

 a tame lion belonging apparently to a British officer 

 resident in Omdurman at one time. When a small 

 cub he had been soundly thumped by his master's 

 fist to reduce him to order. As he grew into a large 

 beast he remained mortally afraid of a thump, though 

 its actual meaning to him then was nothing. He was 

 perfectly good-humoured and kindly, but too playful, 

 and delighted in jumping out on people in order to 

 startle them, or leaping on to them in order to bear 

 them to the ground. He would also climb the tele- 

 graph-poles (for, despite current belief to the con- 

 trary, lions are able to climb, as the present writer 

 can bear witness). On one such occasion, from the 

 top of the pole on which he was resting his chin to 

 get a good look out, he descried his master coming 



Fig. 2. — Gebel Kordi : a typicai Hiii ^5^ fc 



from a distance, and, fearful of punishment, slid down 

 the pole on to the ground with a bump which sobered 

 him for days. 



This book is not an easy one to review, for its 

 information is put together in a scattered and unpre- 

 tentious form, but it is very readable, and gives one 

 as a reward for its perusal a remarkably vivid pic- 

 ture of the general aspect and conditions of the Sudan 

 between Khartum and the Bahr al Zeraf, the White 

 Nile, the Blue Nile, and the river Dinder. 



H. H. Johnston. 



PWDRE SER. 



IN my boyhood I often lived on the coast of Pem- 

 brokeshire. Wandering about with my gun I 

 was familiar with most natural objects which occurred 

 there. One, however, which I often came across 

 there, and have seen elsewhere since, greatly roused 

 my curiosity, but I have not yet met with a satis- 

 factory' explanation of it. 



On the short, close grass of the hilly ground, I 



NO. 2 12 1, VOL. 83] 



frequently saw a mass of white, translucent jelly lying 

 on the turf, as if it had been dropped there. These 

 masses were about as large as a man's fist. It was 

 very like a mass of frog's spawn without the eggs 

 in it. I thought it might have been the gelatinous 

 portion of the food disgorged by the great fish-eating 

 birds, of which there were plenty about, as king- 

 fishers eject pellets made up of the bones of the fish 

 they eat, or that possibly there might be some patho- 

 logical explanation connecting it with the sheep, large 

 flocks of which grazed the short herbage. But the 

 shepherds and owners of the sheep would have known 

 if such an explanation were admissible. They called 

 it " pwdre ser," the rot of the stars. 



Years afterwards I was in Westmorland, on the 

 Geological Survey, and again not unfrequently saw 

 the "pwdre ser." But I now got an addition to my 

 story. Isaac Hindson, of Kirkbv Lonsdale, a man 

 whose scientific knowledge and genial personality 

 made him a welcome companion to those who had 

 to carry on geological research in his district, told me 

 that he had once seen a luminous body fall, and, on 

 going up to the place, found only a 

 mass of white jelly. He did not 

 say that it was luminous. I have 

 never seen it luminous, but that may 

 be because when it was light enough 

 to see the lump of jelly, it would 

 probably be too light to detect 

 luminosity in it. 



Then, in my novel reading, I 

 found that the same thing was 

 known in Scotland, and the same 

 origin assigned to it, for Walter 

 Scott, in "The Talisman," ^ puts 

 these words in the mouth of the 

 hermit : — " Seek a fallen star and 

 thou shalt only light on some foul 

 jelly, which in shooting through the 

 horizon, has assumed for a moment 

 an appearance of splendour." I 

 think that I remember seeing it used 

 elsewhere as an illustration of dis- 

 appointed hopes, which were "as 

 when a man seeing a meteor fall, 

 runs up and finds but a mass of 

 putrid jelly," but I have lost the 

 reference to this passage. 



Thus it appeared that in Wales, in 

 the Lake District, and in Scotland, 

 there existed a belief that something 

 which fell from the sky as a 

 luminous bodv lay on the ground as a lump of white 

 jelly. 



I asked Huxley what it could be, and he said that^ 

 the only thing like it that he knew was a nostoc. 

 I turned to Sachs - for the description of a nostoc, and 

 found that it "consists, when mature, of a large 

 number of moniliform threads interwoven among one 

 another and imbedded in a glutinous jelly, and thus; 

 united into colonies of a specifically defined form. . 

 The gelatinous envelope of the new filament is 

 developed, and the originally microscopic substance 

 attains or even exceeds the size of a walnut by con-j 

 tinuous increase of the jelly and divisions of the 

 cells." 



All the nostocs, however, that I have had pointed 

 out to me have been of a green or purplish or brown- 

 green colour, whereas the " pwdre ser " was always 

 white, translucent in the upper part, and transparent 



1 " Waverley Novels," Border edition, chapter xviii., p. 278. 



-' Sachs, "Text-book of Botany, Morphological and Physiological. . 

 Translated and annotated by Alfred W, Bennett and W.T. Thiselton-Dyer.fl 

 (1875.) 



4. 



.- Torrid Sudan. 



