May 21, 1914| 
In Man for May Mr. Eldon Best discusses the 
question of the peopling of New Zealand. He thinks 
it is going too far to speak of two distinct races in 
the island; but we have certainly the blending of two 
races : the fair-skinned Polynesian, with good features, 
and the swart, thick-lipped, flat-nosed Melanesian 
type. The former has hair with a slight wave in it; 
the hair of the latter, if allowed to grow, has the 
frizzy and bushy appearance of that of the Fijians. 
Between them is an intermediate type, the result of 
blending. Besides these, again, in the Urukehu 
strain we find a fair-haired, light-skinned type, the 
origin of which is still a mystery. Cannibalism, he 
supposes, was by no means a common custom in the 
Society group, whence the Maori came to the island ; 
but it was well established in Fiji, and was probably 
introduced by the Maruiwi—a folk with pronounced 
Fijian affinities—and was thus acquired by the Poly- 
nesian Maori, or rather, was inherited by the mixed 
descendants of these two peoples. 
Tue current number of the Quarterly Review con- 
tains an interesting account of the family of Sadi 
Carnot from the pen of Mr. James Carlill. Sadi him- 
self was a captain of engineers, and died in 1832 when 
only thirty-six, having published his ‘ Reflexions 
sur la puissance motrice du feu” in 1824. 
He was the eldest son of General] Lazare 
Carnot, the ‘organiser of victory” of the first 
Republic, and member of the Committee of 
Public Safety. His younger brother Hippolyte be- 
came Minister of Education in, and his nephew Sadi 
President of, the French Republic (1887). His uncle 
Feulint was almost as distinguished a soldier as his 
father, and three other uncles became judges, one of 
the Cour de Cassation. His grandfather was q dis- 
tinguished notary of Nolay in Burgundy, and his 
grandmother a woman of great beauty. Families of 
ten, twelve, or fourteen members are common in his 
pedigree. According to the author, the family mind, 
which enabled the Carnots for a century and a half to 
supply men to fill the highest offices in the State, was 
the normal brain encouraged from childhood to take 
an active interest in everything, and invigorated by 
constant use. 
Tue fishes collected during the Duke of Mecklen- 
burg’s first expedition to Central Africa are described 
by Messrs. P. Pappenheim and G. A. Boulenger in 
vol. v., Zoologie iii., Lief. 2, of the Wissenschaftliche 
Ergebnisse of the expedition, published at Leipzig by 
Klinkhardt and Biermann. A new genus (Schubotzia) 
of cichlids and a number of new species of various 
groups are named. The same publishers are also 
issuing the scientific results of the Duke’s second 
expedition (‘Ergebnisse der Zweiten Deutschen Zen- 
tral-Africa Expedition, 1910-11,” etc., etc.), of which 
we have received Lief. 2 of the zoological section of 
the first volume, dealing with the copepod and clado- 
cerotine crustaceans. 
- Tue whole of vol. xxv. of Anales del Museo Nacional 
de Historia Natural de Buenos Aires is devoted to 
the mammalian Tertiary faunas of the ‘‘ Araucanian"’ 
formations of Argentina, as specially represented by 
NQs2425, VOL. 93] 
NATURE 301 
those of Monte Hermoso and the Rio Negro, the 
monograph being illustrated by thirty-one plates and 
ninety-two text-figures. The author, Sefior Cayetano 
Rovereto, records a very large number of species, 
some of which are described as new, and likewise 
names several new genera. Most, at any rate, of 
the forms belong to types already familiar through 
the works of Ameghino, Dr. W. B. Scott, and others, 
and it may be a question whether at least some of the 
generic types described as new are not based on trivial 
characters or on those due to immaturity. 
Or late years it has been very generally accepted 
both in this country and on the Continent, that the 
name ‘‘auerochs,”’ or ‘‘aurochs,’’ belongs of right to 
the extinct wild ox, or ur (Bos taurus, primigenius), and 
not to the bison (B. bonasus). This, we believe, was 
first definitely pointed out in this country on p. 14 of 
a paper on the zoology of ancient Europe read by the 
late Prof. A. Newton before the Cambridge Philo- 
sophical Society in 1862, and published later on in the 
same year by Messrs. Macmillan in pamphlet form. 
The writer’s actual words are that the ur or urus 
‘‘has been so very commonly confounded by writers 
with the zubr, or European bison (B. bonasus)—the 
aurochs, as it is commonly, although erroneously, 
called in France and England, that it is not easy to 
make out anything with certainty with regard to it.” 
A similar view, adopted by others of his countrymen, 
was subsequently expressed in Germany by the late 
Prof. A. Nehring, who considered that the name 
auerochs was gradually transferred centuries ago to 
the wild ox, as the latter became exterminated. Re- 
cently Dr. B. Szalay, of N.-Szeben-Hermanstadt, in 
an article published in vol. vi. of Zoologische Annalen 
(p. 54), controverts this view, and maintains that the 
term auerochs properly belongs to the bison or zubr. 
To discuss the merits of the question in this place 
is impossible, but we may quote the legends to Herber- 
stein’s sixteenth-century pictures of the wild ox and 
the bison, which are respectively as follows :—‘ Ich 
bin der Urus welchen die Polen Thur nennen, die 
Deutschen Auerox, die Nichtkenner Bison,’ and ‘‘ Ich 
bin der Bison, welchen die Polen Subr nennen, die 
Deutschen Wysent, die Nichtkenner Urochs.” Again, 
we have the statement by Herberstein, as summarised 
by Prof. A. Mertens (Abh. Mus. Magdeburg, vol. i., 
p. 7, 1906), ‘‘dass der Ur, der dort mit einheimischen 
Namen Thur genannt wird, bei den Deutschen 
Auerochs heisst.”’ 
ATTENTION was directed to the interesting excur- 
sions of the Oberrheinischer geologischer Verein in 
Nature of May 30, 1912 (vol. Ixxxix., p. 328). The 
Jahresbericht of the society for March, 1914, gives the 
programme of an April visit to the Vorarlberg area. 
The same number contains a paper on the origin 
of the Black Forest and the Vosges, by Paul Kessler, 
which will be welcomed on account of its systematic 
treatment of a long series of events. The thirteen 
sections, illustrating the region now occupied by the 
trough-valley of the Rhine, from the close of 
Devonian times to the present day, are worthy of 
reproduction as diagrams for class-instruction. The 
most mountainous condition of the region, when it 
