Oo 
5 
that in every twenty-four hours there are 200: death- 
beds in New York; had the death-rate of twenty 
years ago persisted there would be 130 more! 
AccorDING to the report for 1913, the Rhodesia 
Museum, Bulawayo, is arranging an economic section 
for the display of the natural products of the country, 
which it is hoped will aid in the development of the 
latter. Thanks to an annual grant voted by the 
British South Africa Company, the staff has com- 
menced to collect specimens for exhibition which will 
represent the raw products of the country and the 
preparation they have to undergo before being con- 
verted into finished commercial products. Despite an 
insufficiency of funds, of floor-space, and of exhibition- 
cases, certain departments of the museum—notably the 
herbarium—continue to make satisfactory progress. 
In the annual report of the Field Museum of Natural 
History, Chicago, for the past year it is stated that 
the energies of the staff have been largely occupied in 
preparing exhibition material for the new building. 
The result of this has been a crowding of cases in 
some of the exhibition galleries ‘‘to a degree that. must 
be confusing to visitors, as it certainly is most un- 
satisfactory to the management.” So great, indeed, 
is the pressure, that it is suggested it will be necessary 
Skeleton of the South American Marsupial Czenolestes, believed to be the 
only one on exhibition. About one-third natural size. From the Report 
of the Field Museum 
to.close some of the public galleries and use them as 
storage rooms. An important item in the museum’s 
progress was the return of an expedition, under Dr. 
Lewis, which for three years has been collecting 
ethnological subjects in the islands of the South 
Pacific, and has brought back a vast series of speci- 
mens. An interesting feature of the report is a figure 
(herewith reproduced) of the skeleton of the South 
American marsupial, Czenolestes, the sole survivor of 
the Tertiary family Epanorthide. This skeleton is 
claimed to be at present unique, no other museum, it is 
believed, having a specimen. 
In the report of the U.S. National Museum, Wash- 
ington, for 1913, after reference to the great labour 
involved in the installation of the cases and specimens 
in the new buildings, and a notice of the work that 
has been accomplished in -he anthropological section, 
attention is directed to the exhibits illustrative of the 
geographical distribution of animals—a_ subject to 
which special attention is being devoted in the public 
galleries. The chief faunas illustrated are those of 
North and the Palzarctic, Oriental, 
NO. 2334, VOL. 93| 
America and 
8 NATURE 
“I9I4). 
[JuLy 23, 1914 
Ethiopean regions, a smaller: amount of space being 
assigned to those of South America and Australasia. 
Most striking of all appears to be the exhibit of groups 
of African big game, these including a family of lions, 
another of Cooke’s hartebeest, and a third of the 
Lado white rhinoceros, as well as of the African 
buffalo (incorrectly termed the ‘‘ water-buffalo”’’) and 
Grévy’s zebra. 
In-No. 11 of the Bull, Ac. Sct., St. Petersburg, for 
1914, Dr. N. Nasonov proposes the name Ovis severt- 
zovi for the wild sheep inhabiting the low range on 
the Turkestan frontier of Bokhara, variously known 
as the Karatau, Nuratyntau, Nuratanyntu, Nurata, 
Nuratau, or Nuratadagh. In the Field for 1909 this 
sheep was identified by Mr. Douglas Carruthers with 
Severtzow’s O. nigrimontana, typically from the other 
Karatau, in the province of Syr Daria, on the right 
bank of the river of that name, eastward of the city of 
Turkestan; but Dr. Nasonov, from the evidence of 
specimens in the St. Petersburg Museum, is enabled 
to show that the two are distinct. O.. severtzovi, 
which is the smaller, approximates, as pointed out 
by Mr. Carruthers, to the O.. vignei (arkar) 
group, especially in the presence of a distinct, although 
narrow, throat-ruff, while O. nigrimontana comes 
nearer to the poli type. In referring to it as O. 
poloi nigrimontana, Dr. Nasonov alters Blyth’s name 
poli, which is the genitive of polus, the Latinised form 
of polos. It may be added that, owing to a confusion 
between the two ‘“‘ Karataus,’’ Mr. Lydekker has given 
Bokhara as the typical locality of O. nigrimontana. 
From the Maine Agricultural Experiment Station two 
important studies on reproduction in domestic fowls have 
lately been issued. Maynie R. Curtis writes on double 
and triple-yolked eggs (Biol. Bulletin, vol. xxvi., No. 2, 
Some young pullets are found to produce 
double-yolked eggs when they first begin to lay, about 
20 per cent. of those which lay before the age of seven 
months producing among their first eggs one or more 
with two yolks. Mature birds rarely produce these 
abnormal eggs, and no single bird under observation 
ever produced more than a few of them. Of triple- 
yolked eggs only three were laid in six years among 
more than three thousand birds; in each case the 
abnormality was one of a young pullet’s first progeny. 
Various disturbances of the normal processes of egg 
production may bring two yolks together in the ovi- 
duct, and double-yolked eggs do not always represent 
simultaneous ovulations. The other paper is by Alice 
M. Boring and Raymond Pearl (Journ. Exp. Zool., 
vol. xvi., No. 1, 1914), and deals with the nature of 
the ‘‘odd chromosome,” described by M. F. Guyer in 
1909 in the spermatogenesis of the chick. The exist- 
ence of such a chromosome would suggest that the 
male is heterozygous for sex, whereas crossing experi- 
ments with breeds of domestic poultry and other birds 
that show sex-limited characters seem to indicate 
clearly that the female and not the male is hetero- 
zygous. Guyer worked with ‘‘ Langshan”’ birds, Bor- 
ing and Pearl have used ‘‘ Barred Plymouth Rocks.”’ 
They find in about 12 per cent. of the first spermato- 
cytes, and 3 per cent. of the second spermatocytes, a 
