66 
them on Saturday last, and were equally struck by the 
beauty of the original drawings and the remarkable 
fidelity of the plates reproduced from them. Thirty 
of the plates consist of floral dissections, but those 
inspected were somewhat too small and lacking in 
detail to be of much service to the student; such 
analytical illustrations are usually better done in black 
and white, except where they are on a large scale, as 
in the well-known coloured sections of flowers given 
in Dr. Church’s “Types of Floral Mechanism.” The 
British flowering plants are receiving a large amount 
of attention from artists and photographers at the 
present time, and the appearance of so many attrac- 
tive books is a welcome sign of increasing interest 
in our wild flowers, while it should swell the numbers 
of field naturalists. 
Mr. ArtHur MacDonatp, of Washington, D.C., 
has sent us a leaflet entitled ‘‘ The Study of Man,” the 
object of which is to urge the desirability of labora- 
tories to investigate the bodily and mental character- 
istics of the criminal, pauper, and defective classes. 
This leaflet he has sent to the Home Secretary, Mr. 
McKenna, with a letter directing his attention to the 
importance of such work as a means of throwing light 
on the causation of crime, and as likely to furnish 
a more rational basis for methods of reform. With 
Mr. MacDonald’s object we are in complete agree- 
ment, but in fairness to the Home Office it must be 
said the claims of the anthropological and psycho- 
logical study of criminals have already met with some 
official recognition, as is evidenced by the recent pub- 
lication in the form of a Blue-book of ‘‘The English 
Convict,” by Dr. Goring, the deputy-medical officer of 
Parkhurst Prison. Yet the contents of this memoir 
are perhaps the most convincing indication that could 
be brought forward of the need for the establishment 
of laboratories, each equipped, not necessarily with 
costly and elaborate apparatus, but certainly with a 
properly qualified staff. For Dr. Goring’s results 
clearly demonstrate the importance of the problems 
depending for their solution on work of this nature, 
while at the same time the poverty of the psychological 
data which he had at his disposal indicates the need 
for more advanced experimental work as to the mental 
nature of criminals. 
In the issue of Man for March Sir H. H. Johnston 
discusses the origin of the horse-shoe arch. He sug- 
gests that it and the Mahrab, or holy recess, in the 
Mohammadan mosque, were based on a Phoenician 
sex-cult introduced into the West by Phoenicians, and 
that the horse-shoe arch, under their influence, may 
have arisen independently in southern Spain as it 
likewise arose in Ccele-Syria and southern Tunis. 
‘But if so,” he adds, ‘it is perplexing to find it as a 
pre-Islamic feature in Visigothic buildings of northern 
Spain, whither the Phoenician influence can have 
scarcely penetrated.” 
Pror. ArTHUR KeEITH’s discourse on an anthropo- 
logical study of some portraits of Shakespeare and of 
Burns, delivered at the Royal Institution on February 
20, is printed in the issue of the British Medical 
Journal for February 28. In the case of Shakespeare, 
NO... 2316, VOU; 93) 
NATURE 
[Marcu 19, 1914 
Prof. Keith uses a terra-cotta mask recently found 
_ in one of the midland counties, the bust in the church 
at Stratford, and the Droeshout portrait; for Burns a 
cast of the poet’s skull in the possession of Mr. Bar- 
rington Nash, and portraits by Raeburn and Nasmyth. 
Examination of the head of Shakespeare proves him 
to be a representative example of the short-headed 
type, not of the early British breed, but of the round- 
headed race which entered Britain in the Bronze 
period, about 2000 B.c. His brain capacity was more 
than Ig00 cm., as compared with 1477 in an average 
Englishman. Burns, on the contrary, represents an 
exceptional example of the long-headed type, with a 
brain capacity of 1730 cm., at least 200 cm. above the 
average of his countrymen. His skull displays a close 
analogy with those found by Prof. Bryce in Arran 
cairns. He sprang from families settled round the 
Firth of Clyde, and he is thus a direct descendant of 
the long-headed people who lived in England and 
Scotland during the later Neolithic period. We may 
call Shakespeare a ‘‘Celt”’ in the sense in which this 
term is used on the Continent, while Burns comes 
from the western fringe, usually called ‘‘ Celtic,’’ but 
really pre-Celtic. ‘‘Is it possible,’ asks Prof. Keith, 
‘that we may explain the extraordinary difference in 
the working of their brains by the diversity of their 
racial origin?” 
Tue third All-India Sanitary Conference, held at 
Lucknow on January 19-27, was attended by delegates 
from all parts of India and Ceylon, including the 
Portuguese possessions. Sir Harcourt Butler, in his 
presidential address, reviewed the work that is being 
carried on in the study and practice of Indian sanita- 
tion, but pointed out that progress is necessarily slow 
in a land where the habits and prejudices of centuries 
are arrayed against the sanitary reformer, and where 
it is impossible to benefit fully by the discoveries of 
the secrets of disease and mortality until the people 
are educated to receive and profit by the results of 
scientific investigation. An introductory address to 
the opening meeting of the research section was given 
by Sir Pardey Lukis, Director-General of the Indian 
Medical Service, who reviewed the present state of 
knowledge concerning the etiology and prevention of 
the more prevalent Indian diseases. A number of 
important papers were read before the conference, and 
led to interesting discussions on various problems of 
sanitation and disease, while affording striking 
evidence as to the energy and thoroughness with which 
investigations upon such problems are being carried on 
by the medical officers of our Indian Empire. 
At the last meeting of the Entomological Society 
of London, a communication was received from Mr. 
J. C. Hawkshaw on the subject of the cocoon spun 
by the larva of Lyonetia clerkella, a small moth of the 
family Tineida. The cocoon is slung like a hammock 
between silken threads attached to the surface of a 
leaf. On each side of the area bounded by the sup- 
porting threads, a fine web is spun 3 or 4 mm. wide, 
and very loosely attached to the leaf. If any attempt 
is made to detach the cocoon with the point of a knife 
or similar instrument, the cocoon and webs become a 
