59° 



NA TURE 



[April 20, 1905 



elements in crocodiles. The other articles are on natural 

 and artificial parthenogenesis, by Dr. A. Petrunkevitch ; 

 on the angle of deviation from the vertical at which stems 

 show the strongest geotropical response, by Miss Haynes ; 

 and on the variation in the ray-flowers of Rudbeckia, bv 

 Dr. R. Pearl. 



. -_I.N the April number of Hird A'otes and News reference 

 ^s made to certain common misapprehensions in regard to 

 " the authorities responsible for protective regulations, and it 

 is pointed out that many of these emanate from county 

 councils. To the agriculturist and the horticulturist it is, 

 however, of little consequence whether the alleged over- 

 protection of birds in his particular district is the work 

 of the local or of the Imperial Parliament, for the diffi- 

 culty of getting ordinances repealed appears as difficult 

 in the one case as in the other. In the statement on p. 6i 

 as to the sale of skins of " Argus pheasants from the 

 Himalayas," it should have been pointed out that "Argus 

 pheasant " is the trade name for the peacock pheasants 

 (Euplocamus) of the Himalaya, the true Argus having a 

 very different habitat. 



The following quotation in the February issue of the 

 American Naturalisl from a work by Messrs. Gilbert and 

 Starks on the fishes of the two sides of the Isthmus of 

 Panama has a very great interest from the point of view 

 of distribution in general :—" The ichthyological evidence 

 is overwhelmingly in favour of the e.\istence of a former 

 open communication between the two oceans, which must 

 have become closed at a period sufficiently remote from the 

 present to have permitted the specific differentiation of a 

 very large majority of the forms involved. ... All evidence 

 concurs in fixing the date of that connection at some time 

 prior to the Pleistocene, probably in the early Miocene." 

 This agrees precisely with the conclusions drawn from 

 the study of the fossil mammalian faunas of North and 

 South America, which indicate that land communication 

 between those two continents was interrupted during a 

 considerable portion of the Tertiary epoch, and only re- 

 established about the close of the Miocene or early part 

 of the Pliocene epoch. 



The existence of an entirely distinct second family type 

 of lancelets (Cephalochordata) is demonstrated by Dr. R. 

 Goldschmidt in Biol. Ccntralblatt of April i. It appears 

 that in 1889 Dr. A. Gunther described a lancelet obtained 

 during the Challenger Expedition as a new species, under 

 the name of Branchiostoma pelagicum, its special 

 characteristic being the absence of a tentacle-apparatus. 

 Although on this ground Gill proposed the new generic 

 name Amphioxides in 1895, while Delage and H^rouard 

 pointed out that if the character in question was not due 

 to imperfection the creature indicated a distinct ordinal 

 type, yet it has generally been allowed to remain in the 

 type genus, as in Prof. Herdman's account of the group 

 in the "Cambridge Natural History." The examination 

 of twenty-six entire specimens obtained during the recent 

 German deep-sea expedition enables Dr. Goldschmidt to 

 state that A. pelagicus. together with two closely allied 

 species, represents a distinct family of Cephalochordata, 

 which may be distinguished from the typical family as 

 follows :— Family Branchiostomatida;.— A peribranchial 

 space; the ventrally-opening mouth surrounded by ten- 

 tacles; gill-canal furnished throughout its diameter with 

 lateral gill-slits. Family Amphioxidid.-e.— No peribranchial 

 space ; the slit-like mouth opening on the left side ; gill- 

 slits situated in the ventral median line; gill-canal divided 

 into a dorsal nutritive and a ventral rcspir;:lorv li;:ll. 

 NO. 1851, VOL. 71] 



Indian Public Health for March (vol. i. No. 8) contains 

 articles on septic tank installations in Bengal, sewage 

 disposal in India, Hankin's views on plague epidemiology, 

 the Finsen method, &c. 



In the Revue scientifique (April 8) M. Calmette, the 

 director of the Pasteur Institute, Lille, writes on the im- 

 portant rdle played by medical science in the successful 

 colonisation of tropical countries, instancing such diseases 

 as cholera, leprosy, plague, and malaria, which can be 

 robbed of their terrors only by the institution of efficient 

 sanitary control in the districts in which they occur. 



M.\jOR RoN.^LD Ross, F.R.S., in a letter to the Times 

 (.•\pril 7) directs attention to the remarkable diminution 

 in malarial disease which has accompanied the institution 

 of anti-mosquito measures at Klang and Port Swetten- 

 ham in the Federated Malay States. The former, with a 

 population of 3576, and the latter of about 700, were both 

 perfect hotbeds of malaria, and in 1901, for the two 

 towns, 236 sick certificates and 1026 days of leave were 

 granted. In 1902, after anti-mosquito measures had been 

 energetically pursued, the figures were 40 and 198, and in 

 1904 these had further fallen to 14 and 71 respectively. 

 Dr. Malcolm Watson, district surgeon, from whose re- 

 port these statistics are taken, sums up by saying : — " In 

 whatever direction one turns, it is plain that the two areas 

 which were so malarious in 1901 are now practically, if 

 not absolutely, free from the disease, and that the district 

 surrounding these two areas remains much as it was." 

 These anti-mosquito measures were initiated by the De- 

 partment for Medical Research, Federated Malay States 

 (which is affiliated with the London School of Tropical 

 Medicine), under the direction of Dr. Hamilton Wright. 



In a short paper which appeared in the Botanical 

 Gazette (February) Mr. C. H. Chamberlain advances the 

 opinion that an alternation of generations as understood 

 by botanists for plants can be recognised in animals. The 

 egg with the three polar bodies constitutes a generation 

 comparable with the female gametophyte in plants ; 

 similarly, the primary spermatocyte with the four sperm- 

 atozoa constitute a generation comparable with the male 

 gametophyte in plants. All other cells of the animal con- 

 stitute a generation comparable with the sporophytic 

 generation in plants. 



Two debated points connected with the problems of 

 geotropism in plants, i.e. the seat of geotropic sensibility, 

 and the statolith theory simultaneously advanced by Haber- 

 landt and Nenec, form the subject of a critical review by 

 Dr. Linsbauer, who writes in Naturwissenschaftliche 

 Wochenschrift (March, No. 11). The reviewer may be 

 regarded as an adherent to the statolith theory, and notes 

 that although the rSle of statoliths is generally attributed 

 to starch grains, in their absence other bodies, such as 

 crystals of calcium oxalate, or certain bright bodies found 

 in the rhizoids of Chara, may function similarly. 



The Bulletin of the American Geographical Society con- 

 tains an article on the work of the Reclamation Service 

 of the United States, by Mr. C. J. Blanchard. During 

 the last three and a half years a sum of nearly twenty- 

 five million dollars has been realised from the sale of 

 public lands, and work has been begun on eight irrigation 

 projects which will make an area of about one million 

 acres productive. The National Geographic Magazine for 

 March has a short article, with excellent illustrations, on 

 the same subject. 



