i June 30, 1910] 



NATURE 



d3 



school on Saturday last, when Surgeon-General Sir Alfred 

 Keogh, C.B., who was one of the speakers, said he had 

 endeavoured to help science in the appointment which he 

 had lately vacated. His special mission was to endeavour 

 to bring into the counsels of the War Office a realisation 

 of the fact that medicine was an applied science, and that 

 it was not concerned merely with the treatment of disease, 

 but with its prevention. The problem of making the 

 tropics habitable was easy, and they could make such 

 countries as West and Central Africa as salubrious as 

 Liverpool if they would only take the trouble to think 

 about it and would organise for the purpose. Medical 

 science had also a definite relation to war. He described 

 the work of Sir David Bruce in practically stamping out 

 Malta fever. Thanks to applied medicine, there had been 

 added to the Indian Army for defensive purposes last year 

 the equivalent of two battalions. 



The Cavendish lecture will be delivered to the West 

 London Medico-Chirurgical Society to-morrow by Sir 

 Thomas Oliver, who will take as his subject '" Empyema 

 and some Problems Connected Therewith." 



The summer meeting of the Junior Institution of 

 Engineers will be held in Dublin and Belfast from July i6 

 to 23. The proceedings are to be opened by a reception 

 at Trinity College, Dublin, by the provost and professors 

 of engineering, and afterwards a number of engineering 

 works, &c., will be visited. 



The autumn meeting of the Iron and Steel Institute 

 will take place at Buxton on September 26 to 30. 



The necessity of applying what may be called the 

 " intensive " method of treating some questions of Indian 

 ethnology is enforced by a paper recently read by Sir R. 

 Temple before the Royal Society of Arts on the people 

 of Burma, and by the discussion which followed. The 

 authorities are at issue en the order of the invasions from 

 which the present population resulted. Sir R. Temple 

 thinks that the order of entrance into the peninsula was 

 Mon-Khmer, Tai or Shan, Bama or Burmese. Sir J. G. 

 Scott believes that the Shan, if they migrated at all, 

 formed the third body of newcomers ; but he prefers to 

 suppose that the Shan never migrated. Again, as regards 

 religion. Sir R. Temple treats the vast majority of 

 Burman Buddhists as Animists, Animism taking the form 

 of Nat worship. Mr. E. Colston, on the contrary, holds 

 that though Nat worship may be animistic in origin, it is 

 an integral part of Buddhism, analogous to the Deva 

 worship in Ceylon. These two authorities are again 

 hopelessly at issue in their views as to the period when 

 Hindu influence became powerful in the country. 



The iron styles used for writing in India are interest- 

 ing, because it is through them that the tj-pes of the 

 present scripts have been determined, the circular class of 

 alphabets, like the Oriya or Burmese, depending upon the 

 necessity, in order to avoid breaking the material, of 

 moving the style in a curve, not in a straight line, along 

 the fibre of the palm-leaf. Mr. I. H. Burkill in vol. vi., 

 part i., of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 

 for the current year describes a large collection of these 

 styles. He arranges them in no less than thirty-seven 

 types, beginning with the most simple form, like a porcu- 

 pine quill, and gradually developing into the most intricate 

 and elaborate shapes. 



In the June number of Man Mr. T. M. Joyce describes 

 some curious wooden engraved blocks used by the 

 Bushongo of the Belgian Congo for ornamenting their 

 bodies on festal occasions, and for staining palm cloth and 



NO. 2122, VOL, 83] 



embroidery fibres with a red pigment prepared by bruising 

 the wood of a tree known as tukula. They are good 

 examples of the work of this naturally artistic race. It 

 is remarkable that, like our mourning rings, the heir of a 

 dead man, acting as chief mourner, distributes a number 

 of these articles to the immediate friends of the deceased 

 as mementoes. 



A GOOD example of the rain-making chiefs, to whom 

 Prof. J. G. Frazer first directed attention, is to be found 

 in a paper on such functionaries in the Gondokoro district. 

 White Nile, contributed to the June issue of Man by Mr. 

 W. E. Cole. The rain-maker shows considerable shrewd- 

 ness in his proceedings. He always builds his village on 

 a hill slope, which he knows attracts the clouds. He 

 smears himself with wood ashes, and wears a number of 

 charms. Then he produces a pot in which he keeps his 

 rain-stones, generally pieces of crystal, aventurine, or 

 amethyst, found on the neighbouring hills. These, in the 

 true spirit of mimetic magic, he covers with water, and, 

 taking in his hand a peeled cane split at the top, he 

 beckons towards him the clouds if his people need rain. 

 Sometimes he maliciously diverts the rain-clouds towards 

 some unfriendly tribe. If by chance his incantations fail, 

 he announces that some hostile chief in the neighbourhood 

 has stolen the rain. This often leads to a raid on the 

 offending village, and to many broken heads. 



The Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital for May 

 (xxi.. No. 230) is devoted to an important article by Drs. 

 Crowe, Cushing, and Homans on the results of removal 

 of the hypophysis cerebri, or pituitarj' body, a small 

 glandular organ at the base of the brain. Methods were 

 elaborated whereby the organ could be removed without 

 injury to the adjacent brain. In dogs the most striking 

 features following removal are development of a state of 

 obesit}', alterations in the sexual organs, and skin, sub- 

 normal body temperature, sugar in the urine, psychic dis- 

 turbance, and finally death — all of them symptoms which 

 have occasionally been noticed in man in connection with 

 tumours of the pituitary body. The paper makes a very 

 notable addition to our knowledge of the functions of this 

 organ. 



The difficulty of deciding whether butter is genuine or 

 adulterated is illustrated in a paper by Mr. G. Brownlee 

 issued by the Department of Agriculture and Technical 

 Instruction for Ireland. The committee on butter regula- 

 tions, in their final report, recommended that in the case of 

 any butter giving a Reichert-Wollny number below 24 the 

 presumption should be that the sample is adulterated with 

 foreign fats. As certain Irish butters, known to be 

 genuine, have been found to fall below this limit, an 

 extended set of observations was made. It appears that 

 the chief factor influencing the Reichert-Wollny number is 

 the lactation period of the cows supplying the milk, and 

 that in order to get butter of a more uniform composition 

 the calving of the cows should be distributed more evenly 

 over the year. 



The Department of Agriculture in the Leeward Islands 

 carries out a number of experiments on sugar-cane, the 

 results of which for the past season are now published. 

 Of the varieties examined, some show themselves well 

 suited for cultivation at all the various experimental 

 centres, while others are more limited in their range and 

 are at their best on certain special types of soil. The 

 manurial experiments are mainly on the ordinary lines, 

 but some new ground is broken. Molasses has been tried 

 as a fertiliser with results that justify further investiga- 



