Juty 30, 1914] 
NATURE 
567 
for the disposal of the dead. It was used in excep- 
tional cases, as, for instance, when a tribe occupied 
open country where fo suitable places for the final 
disposal of the bones after exhumation were avail- 
able; when a raiding party, or even a gang of peace- 
ful travellers, lost one of their members by death 
outside the tribal boundaries; and it was occasionally 
practised to stay epidemic disease. At the time of 
the cremation wands were set up near the pyre as a 
refuge for the separable soul. The custom no longer 
prevails, though cases are known where the corpses 
of British dead were burned by the natives during the 
last Maori war. 
In No. 4 of the second series of Bankfield Museum 
Notes, issued by the Halifax Corporation, Miss L. E. 
Start describes a collection of Coptic cloths presented 
by Prof. Flinders Petrie. The paper deals with 
Egyptian dress from the earliest times, and the evolu- 
tion of the art of weaving is illustrated by excellent 
sketches from the monuments and by a description 
of the methods and appliances used. The cloths fall 
into five groups, of which those representing the period 
320-620 A.D. are the most interesting in the series. 
NORTHERN Europe has experienced a spell of un- 
usually hot weather during July and the thermometer 
has, in places, been high almost throughout the 
month. The type of weather has been anticyclonic 
over Scandinavia and the adjacent regions, and winds 
have been very light. The observations used for the 
following comparisons have been culled from the 
daily weather reports of the Meteorological Office and 
a few missing readings have been interpolated. 
Daily temperatures for July 1 to 24 have been dealt 
with. The mean temperature for the whole period 
at Haparanda, at the head of the Gulf of Bothnia, 
and in close proximity to the Arctic Circle, is 66-4°, 
which is 1-6° warmer than the mean in London, and 
38° warmer than the mean at Bath. At Stockholm 
the mean temperature for July 1 to 24 is 73-0° and 
at St. Petersburg 71-1°, whilst the mean at Nice is 
724°, and at Paris only 65-6°, or o-8° warmer than 
London. The mean maximum or highest day tem- 
perature at Stockholm is 82-1° and at St. Petersburg 
80:2°, whilst in London, where the temperature has 
been in excess of the average, every day at Green- 
wich, from July 1 to 22, having a temperature above 
70°, the mean maximum at Kew was 72-9°. Hapar- 
anda was warmer than London on 15 days out of 
the 24, and St. Petersburg was warmer than London 
on 21 days, and on two days the sheltered thermo- 
meter touched go°. On five consecutive days, July 
3 to 7, the temperature at Bodé, within the Arctic 
Circle, exceeded that in London, and was above 80° 
from July 5 to 7. Stockholm was warmer than Bath 
on 23 days. The colder weather which was being 
experienced over the British Isles during the closing 
week of July had also extended somewhat to most 
other parts of Europe, and the highest day tempera- 
ture in the northern regions had dropped to about 
7Ou: 
ActTING on the advice of the French resident, the 
King of Annam has recently issued an order pro- 
NO. 2335, VOL. 93] 
hibiting the slaughter of the wild elephant in the 
protectorate of Annam. The capture, domestication, 
and sale of these animals will be permitted under 
certain regulations. 
Dr. ALEXANDER IRvING has reprinted, from the 
Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History 
Society (vol. xv., part 3, May, 1914), an account of 
recent discoveries of prehistoric horse remains in the 
valley of the Stort. He concludes that the specimen 
discovered has the vertebral column of the zebra and 
of the forest type of horse, and differs in this respect 
from all four skeletons in the Museum of the College 
of Surgeons, as well as from the Prejevalsky horse of 
Mongolia and from horses of the Plateau type. 
Annats of the Durban Museum is the title of a new 
zoological journal, of which the first number, edited 
by the curator, Mr. E. C. Chubb, was published on 
June 1. Subsequent numbers are to be issued after 
such successive intervals as may be found convenient. 
Of the four articles in the present issue, the longest 
is one by the editor on a collection of some 2500 South 
African birds’ eggs, representing 308 species, brought 
together by the late Mr. A. D. Millar; it is illustrated 
by a coloured plate. In a second article, on the bottle- 
nosed dolphins, or perpoises, of the genus Tursiops, 
Mr. F. W. True directs attention to the fact that the 
proper name of the typical species is T. truncatus, and 
not T. tursio, the latter specific designation having 
been originally applied to a larger cetacean from 
Greenland waters, where there is no evidence of the 
occurrence of a bottle-nose of any kind. 
Tue June number of Naturen contains a fully illus- 
trated description of the up-to-date hatchery for sea- 
fishes, which has recently been established at Flode- 
vigen, on the Skagerak, and is now in full working 
order. In addition to the more important apparatus 
used in the hatchery, the illustrations include photo- 
graphs of very young torsk at various stages of 
development. Many millions of these valuable food- 
fishes were hatched last year. 
As the result of two exploring cruises, Mr. James 
Hornell is enabled to report (in Bulletin No. 8 of the 
Madras Fisheries Bureau) the existence off the Tan- 
jore coast of Madras of a trawling-ground of far 
higher value than any of those off the coast of Ceylon. 
It comprises a large plateau lying within the hundred- 
fathom line otf Cape Comorin, and appears to be the 
resort of numerous bottom-feeding food-fishes, which 
are at present fished only in a desultory manner by 
natives with the line. Among these fishes are vast 
shoals of the great oyster-eating ray (Rhinoptera 
javanica), which inflicts such serious damage to the 
pearl-oyster banks. In a second article in the same 
issue Mr. Hornell shows that these and other fishes 
(most of which devour only the immature molluscs) 
are the real cause of the great periodic fluctuations in 
the fertility of the pearl-oyster beds of the Gulf of 
Manaar, which have long puzzled experts. Sugges- 
tions for dealing with the evil are appended. 
EXPERIMENTS on the inheritance of bodily size in 
tame rabbits form the subject of an article by Mr. 
E. C. Macdowell, published by the Carnegie Institu- 
