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NATURE 



[September 25, 1890 



As this sentence forms part of this year's great annual scien- 

 tific manifesto, with which Presidents of the British Association 

 for the Advancement of Science are wont to favour your 

 readers, I trust your love of scientific precision will help me to 

 point out that, '■'prior" to the very serious accident near Man- 

 chester, public attention " %oas " directed in England to the 

 powerfully explosive nature of this substance itself through the 

 medium of a very serious publication in London, or rather 

 through the medium of two very serious publications — viz. a 

 patent and a paper read before the Chemical Society, as you will 

 see from the following statement,^ which I drew up last spring at 

 the request of and, as I hoped, for the use of my distinguished 

 fellow- inventor, the President of the Government Committee 

 on Explosives, and now President of the British Association for 

 the Advancement of Science. H. Sprengel. 



54 Denbigh Street, S.W., September 13. 



A Recently Established Bird Migration. 



Buried in the heart of a newspaper article of the 4th inst., 

 on incorporated Worthing, is a statement which, if it may be 

 relied on, seems to me of curious, if not unique, interest, inas- 

 much as it dates very closely what seems now an annual migra- 

 tion of birds. After speaking of West Tarring as dividing with 

 Lancing the title of the capital of English Figland, the journalist 

 (Daily Telegraph, September 4) goes on to say, "There it was 

 that Thomas A'Becket planted the first slip — now a mouldering 

 stump— whence, it is said, all these shady alleys, redolent of 

 syrupy sweetness, derive their origin. There is no handsomer 

 shrub-tree than the fig, spreading forth its many-veined, broad 

 leaves in grateful shade, while the fruit, varying from juicy 

 green acorns to great purple bulbs— I bought some yesterday 

 four inches in length— peer boldly forth from every available 

 twig. Even that discriminating bird, the Italian beccafico, has 

 become aware, in some mysterious way, of the existence of the 

 Worthing fig-gardens, and comes over to spend a pleasant six 

 weeks among them, just as we go for change of air to Switzer- 

 land or the Black Forest, This is the time for his arrival, and 

 if I may judge by certain well-picked figs on the Tarring trees, I 

 should say that he had taken up his quarters somewhere in the 

 immediate vicinity of the noble thirteenth century church." 



We may reasonably allow a century or so from the time of 

 Henry IL, before the fig-tree would be sufficiently acclimatized 

 and established at Worthing to attract such visitors. And 

 then, always supposing that it is the Italian beccafico {Motacilla 

 curruca, Linn. ) which comes, it seems probable that he follows 

 fig-harvest along the Riviera, and up from Southern to Northern 

 France; though how so delicite and toothsome a mouthful 

 manages to run the gauntlet of the continual potting which 

 almost exterminates bird life over great breadths of that long 

 journey is more difficult to understand. And then is it possible 

 that a bold spirit of adventure, rather than any well-grounded 

 certainty of knowledge, led the first comers across the Channel ? 

 Because it is a strange fact vouched for by more than one 

 observer, and which goes dead against the old unerring instinct 

 theory, that occasionally in the autumn migration, long streams 

 of oar emigrants make boldly out to sea from our westernmost 

 coast where there is no land nearer than the east coast of 

 America, and the whole flight must needs perish. 



But as this whole question of bird migration is still one of the 

 most dimly-lighted regions in the whole arcana of natural 

 history, and its beginnings in most cases go far back into 

 immemorial time, I trust — despite the great demands just now 

 of the British Association reports on your valuable space — that 

 you will kindly give some competent ornithologist, resident at, 

 or a visitor to Worthing, the opportunity of confirming, if the 

 fact is so, that the Italian fig-pecker has formed the habit of 

 attending fig ripening there since the time of Thomas A'Becket. 



Henry Cecil. 



Bregner, Bournemouth, September 9. 



The Common Sole. 



Mr. Cunningham, in his valuable "Treatise on the Common 

 Sole," recently published, remarks (p. 125), " Why I have failed 

 to obtain soles in the first year of their growth, after the stage of 

 those found at Mevagissey in May, I cannot understand. " It 

 may be of interest to those who are studying this subject to know 

 that, among the investigations organized by the Royal Dublin 

 Society, and intrusted to my care on board the s. s. Fingal off 



* We have not considered it necessary to print this statement. — Ed. 

 NO. 1091, VOL. 42] 



the west of Ireland, during the past summer, the working out 

 of the life-history of sea fish took a prominent place. 



In August, soles born in February and March were not found 

 in shallow water, though careful search was made for them. 

 Outside 50 fathoms we began to meet them. In 80 fathoms we 

 took them in abundance, and also found them in the stomachs of 

 other fish captured by the trawl in similar depths. 



William Spotswood Green, 

 H.M. Inspector of Irish Fisheries. 



Dublin Castle, September 22. 



A Meteor. 



At about 7.49 p.m. on the 14th inst., I saw from the garden 

 of the Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone, an unusually large and bright 

 meteor descend towards the north-west point of the horizon. 

 The long and full tail left behind, like that of a large rocket, 

 enabled one to trace its path, which at its highest point was about 

 6° or 8° no«'.h of Arcturus. The meteor, which was very much 

 larger apparently than Jupiter, descended very slowly along a 

 slightly wavy line of a mean inclination of about 75° to the 

 horizon. The end of its path was hidden by houses on the 

 " Bayle." J. Parnell. 



Pavilion Hotel, Folkestone, September 19. 



THE WHITE RHINOCEROS. 



\17RITING of his sporting adventures on the River 



*•' Se-whoi-whoi (a confluent of the Umniati) in 



Southern Mashuna-Iand, Mr. F. Selous, in the Field of 



August 16, says as follows: — 



"It was within a mile of this spot that, two years 

 previously [i.e. in 1883], I shot two white rhinoceroses 

 {Rhinoceros simus), the last of their kind that have been 

 killed (and,, perhaps, that ever will be killed) by an 

 Englishman. They were male and female, and I pre- 

 served the skin of the head and the skull of the former 

 for the South African Museum in Cape Town, where 

 they now are. I shall never cease to regret that I did 

 not preserve the entire skeleton for our own splendid 

 Museum of Natural History at South Kensington ; but 

 when I shot the animal I made sure I should get finer 

 specimens later on in the season. However, one thing 

 and another prevented my visiting the one spot of the 

 country where I knew that a few were still to be found, 

 and now those few have almost, if not quite all, been 

 killed ; and, to the best of my belief, the great white, or 

 square-mouthed, rhinoceros, the largest of modern ter- 

 restrial mammals after the elephant, is on the very verge 

 of extinction, and in the next year or two will become 

 absolutely extinct. If in the near future some student of 

 natural history should wish to know what this extinct 

 beast really was like, he will find nothing in all the 

 museums of Europe and America to enlighten him upon 

 the subject but some half-dozen skulls and a goodly 

 number of the anterior horns." 



The skin of the head of the male white rhinoceros shot 

 by Mr. Selous on the occasion spoken of above was 

 forwarded by the authorities of the South African 

 Museum to Mr. E. Gerrard, Jun., of Camden Town, to be 

 mounted for their collection. Mr. Gerrard, knowing the 

 rarity of specimens of this animal, was kind enough to 

 allow the mounted head to be exhibited at a meeting of 

 the Zoological Society of London in 1886, along with a 

 corresponding head of the (so-called) black rhinoceros 

 {R. bicornis], so that an easy comparison might be made 

 between them. 



The differences between the external forms of the heads 

 of the two African rhinoceroses, though not, perhaps, so 

 striking as the well-known differences in their skulls, are 

 sufficiently obvious on comparison. I will venture to 

 point them out in the pages of Nature, in the hope that 

 the attention of the several exploring parties now 

 traversing Mashuna-land and Matabeli-land may be 

 called to this subject, and that, in case of a straggling 



