200 
NATURE 
[DECEMBER 31, 1903 
McLachlan, Lord Walsingham, and several others. A 
complete list of the plants of Sokotra and Abd-el-Kuri, 
inclusive of important additions obtained by Dr. 
Forbes, is furnished by Prof. Bayley Balfour, whilst 
a note by Prof. J. W. Gregory on the geology is a 
reprint of a short paper published in the Geological 
Magazine for 1899. This paper, which was founded 
on a collection of rock specimens brought back by 
Dr. Forbes’s expedition, is supplemented by an extract 
from a report by Prof. Bonney on a similar collection 
made by Prof. Bayley Balfour in 1880. It is very 
much to be regretted that a translation of some of Dr. 
Kossmat’s published notes on the geology was not 
also added, for whilst, as might be expected in reports 
on rock specimens collected by naturalists who are not 
geologists, the notes now reprinted give a fair account 
of the crystalline and volcanic rocks of the Sokotran 
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Gregory in Australia is probably the reason why a 
fuller account of the geology as now known is not 
supplied. 
The work is well illustrated with coloured plates 
and figures in the text. Amongst the plates, the re- 
presentations of the wild ass (introduced by man but 
now feral), of some of the birds (especially a new goat- 
sucker, Caprimulgus Jonesi), and of the land mollusca, 
spiders and insects (butterflies, moths, microlepi- 
doptera, wasps and bees, beetles, &c.), are good ex- 
amples of chromolithography. The text figures of 
| mollusea and beetles, each surrounded by a grey rect- 
angular area in which the actual shell or insect does 
not always occupy the central position, though good 
representations, have a somewhat unpleasing effect. 
The few figures of planis are good, and especial atten- 
| tion may be directed to the remarkable Euphorbia dis- 
covered by Dr. Forbes in Abd-el-Kuri. 
As is usually the case in books like that 
Fic. 2. —Dragon’s-Blood Tree. 
(From ‘*The Natural History of Sokotra.’’) 
group, they afford a very imperfect idea of the sedi- | 
mentary formations, although the latter occupy by far 
the greater portion of the islands. The massive 
Nummulitic, Alveolina, and Hippuritic limestones, 
of which the islands chiefly consist, and which are of 
much greater geological importance than the granitic 
formations underlying them, are only mentioned 
vaguely as Cretaceous and Eocene limestones. No 
notice naturally is taken of one curious discrepancy 
between the collected specimens and Dr. Kossmat’s 
statements. Both Prof. Balfour’s and Dr. Forbes’s 
collections from Sokotra contained comparatively 
modern volcanic rocks resembling those of Aden, 
whilst Dr. Kossmat states that no such rocks oceur in 
Sckotra. (‘‘ Jungvulecanische Bildungen fehlen auf 
Sokotra—ganz im gegensatze zur gegeniiberliegenden 
Kuiste Arabiens—vollstanding,’’ Sitz. math. nat. Cl. K. 
Akad. Wiss. Wien, 1899, p. 77.) The absence of Prof. 
NO. 1783, VOL. 69] 
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now before us, some curious illustrations of 
zoological nomenclature are conspicuous. 
For instance, Mr. Kirkaldy, to whom we are 
indebted for an account of the Rhynchota, 
has invented a generic name which he spells 
Klinophilos. | Naturalists in general who 
follow the old rules of Latin orthography 
would have written Clinophilus, but ortho- 
graphical heterodoxy is by no means the 
most extraordinary feature of the case, for 
the new name is given to a genus the type 
-of which appears, according to the rules of 
Linnzeus himself, to be also the type of the 
Linnean genus Cimex. 
Again, in the two sections, dealing with 
the land mollusca, each of the two authors 
quotes a generic name, Achatinelloides, 
given, not by themselves, but by another 
writer. It is difficult to understand why so 
absurd a term as this, derived from a double 
Latin diminutive of dubious accuracy by the 
addition of a Greek adjectival termination, 
should be preserved instead of being simply 
ignored. Some explanation, too, might 
have been vouchsafed why the same families 
of mollusca are termed Pomatiidae and 
Pupide by one author, Cyclostomidae and 
Helicidae by the other. 
The discussion of the “‘ distribution of land 
and water in the Indian Ocean as indicated 
by a study of the fauna and flora of the 
islands’ is one of the subjects mentioned 
in the preface as having been left over for 
a future publication. It is to be regretted 
that a general summary of. the results 
obtained, so as to afford an idea of the 
zoological relations between Sokotra and the neigh- 
bouring continents, has not been added to the present 
volume, and it must be hoped that Dr. Forbes, who 
has already contributed to our knowledge of the dis- 
tribution of animal life in the islands of the Indian 
Ocean, will before long publish his views on the 
results of his investigation of the Sokotran fauna. 
The principal features of Sokotran zoology are the 
following. There are, as already remarked, no in- 
digenous mammals, no batrachians or freshwater 
fishes. Amongst sixty-seven species of birds recorded 
from Sokotra, eleven appear to be peculiar to the 
island, and of the twenty-two birds from Abd-el-Kuri 
three are unknown elsewhere. Of twenty Sokotran 
land reptiles no less than fifteen are peculiar, and three 
genera out of thirteen; the number known from 
Abd-el-Kuri is only three, of which two are peculiar 
to the island, whilst one is rather widely dis- 
