354 



NA TURE 



[February 8, 1906 



ulterieusement £tendre le nombre des observations pluvio- 

 metriqucs si la necessity s'en fail sentir. 



(4) Les chefs des services m£t£orologiques et hydro- 

 graphiques sont pries d'ajouter aux donn^es meteor- 

 ologiques envoyees a la Commission, autant de donnees 

 sur la niveau et la debit des rivieres et des lacs qu'ils 

 croirent possibles et utiles. 



(5) That the secretary be asked to prepare a regional 

 statement of rainfall for India as an example of what the 

 Commission desires in the way of reports of regional rain- 

 fall and variation of rainfall for each meteorological 

 organisation. 



Instructions wire given to Dr. W. J. S. Lockyer for 

 his action as representative of the Commission at the 

 Oxford meeting oi the Solar Research Union. 



It was resolved that while thanking the Washington 

 Weather Bureau for its courteous offer to publish in the 

 Washington Monthly Weather Review the data collected 

 by the Commission, the Commission is not yet in a posi- 

 tion to decide upon the most appropriate form of 

 publication. 



It was decided that a circular should be sent to the 

 various meteorological organisations in the following 

 terms : — The Commission desire to direct attention to the 

 concluding paragraph of Prof. Violle's report to the Inter- 

 national Meteorological Committee, 1003, and would be 

 greatly obliged if the Commission could be informed of the 

 arrangements for observing solar radiation adopted at 

 the observatories of the various meteorological organisations 

 and the methods employed to render the observations com- 

 parable with those of other observatories. 



A first list of places at which actinometric observations 

 are made was presented. 



It was resolved that " une circulaire sera envoye 

 aux directeurs des services meteorologiques pour leur 

 demander de designer les stations de leur pays ou les 

 observations actinomitriques sont regulierement faites. 

 Dans le liste des stations il serait utile d'eHiter les grandes 

 villes ou les conditions atmospheriques sont generalment 

 deT ectueuses. " 



That steps should be taken to obtain observations from 

 the places mentioned. 



La Commission Solaire prie M. le President de 

 vouloir bien obtenir les courbes de la distribution de 

 I'energie solaire pour les observatoires qui ont deja 

 l'oblig^ance de communiquer les autres donnees indiques 

 dans les Comptes rendus des Seances de la Conference de 

 Cambridge, a propos de la physique solaire. 



ANTHROPOLOGICAL NOTES. 



J 'ANTHROPOLOGIE usually devotes much space to 

 ■ '- archaeology, and the recent number (vol. xvi., Nos. 

 4-5) contains three papers on that subject. Mr. 11. 

 Obermaier gives the first instalment of a most useful 

 memoir on Quaternary human remains and the sites in 

 Central Europe where they have occurred. Mr. A. Yire 

 describes a prehistoric cave of the Solutre period at Lacave 

 (Lot); the human bones were too fragmentary to have any 

 value. Mr. E. Cartailhac and Father Breuil continue their 

 account of the mural paintings and engravings of the 

 Pyrenean caves; they give several illustrations; as is 

 usually the case among primitive peoples, the represent- 

 ations of human beings fall greatly below the excellence of 

 animal delineations. The authors come to the conclusion 

 that in the cave of Marsoulas the earlier engravings with 

 hue M contours are associated with black paintings, while 

 the later engravings, in which the contours are made with 

 short lines to indicate hair, are associated with poly- 

 chromatic paintings of animals. In a paper on the 

 myology of a Negro, Messrs. R. Anthony and A. Hazard 

 state that muscles are thick and short, thus indicating 

 strength rather than agility. Hunting and agriculture 

 among the populations of the Sudan are the subjects of a 

 paper by Mr. J. Decorse. Mr. L. G. Seurat describes the 

 marae, or stone altars, of the little frequented eastern 

 islands of the Tuamotu Arcrfipelago. Mr. C. Monteil dis- 

 courses on the numbers and numeration among the 

 Maudes, a large linguistic family of people of western 



NO. 1; 



OL. 73] 



1 1 en. h Africa. The journal contains the usual valuable 

 re'sumi of recent anthropological literature. 



Two papers in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of 

 Bengal (vol. lxxiii.) should not be overlooked. Mr. J. E. 

 Friend-Pereira has discovered totemism among the Khonds, 

 where the wider totemic exogamy has been hidden by the 

 1 11 wer and probably newer rule of the " local, com- 

 munal, or family type." The "septs," as the authoi 

 terms the totem groups, have the ordinary totem tabus 

 of feeding, use and marriage, and myths of origin. He 

 believes totemism " serves to mark to a primitive people 

 who possess no written characters to record kinship and 

 descent as they begin to get more remote in time the dis- 

 tinction between separate stocks of blood. In other 

 words, totemism is merely a guide for the observance of 

 1 lie rules oi exogamy : it is not the cause that originated 

 or evolved these rules." He holds that the explanation oi 

 the origin of totemism must be sought for, not in its 

 social, but in its religious aspect. Among the Khonds " the 

 totem ranks as the spirit of the ancestor founder oi the 

 stock, who is also the chief tutelary deity of the tocl 

 and the totem class is considered as a manifestation of 

 the chief tutelary deity." Major P. R. T. Guidon has a 

 valuable short paper on the Khasis, Syntengs, and allied 

 tribes of Assam, among whom mother-right so pre- 

 dominates that males can own only self-acquired property. 

 There are traces of totemism. Ancestors are worshipped 

 by the erection of remarkable memorial stones, of which 

 two illustrations are given ; this form of worship largely 

 underlies the Khasi religious system. Divination by the 

 breaking of eggs is very common. Major Gurdon is super- 

 intendent of ethnography in Assam, and is apparently 

 preparing a monograph on the people under his charge 

 which, judging from these notes, should be a valuable work. 



The current number of the Journal of the Anthropological 

 Institute (vol. xxxv., 1905) contains papers in all branches 

 of anthropology. Physical anthropology is represented by a 

 paper by Messrs. F. G. Parsons and C. R. Box on the 

 relations of the cranial sutures to age, and by a critical 

 paper by Dr. C. S. Myers traversing the conclusion of Miss 

 Fawcett that in certain characters a progressive evolution 

 has taken place in regard to the " prehistoric " ami 

 modern Egyptians. South African archreology has been 

 much to the fore of late ; the notes on the Great Zimbabwe 

 elliptical ruin by Mr. Franklin White, and a paper on the 

 stone forts and pits on the Inyanga Estate, Rhodesia, were 

 written before Mr. Randall-Mad ver's subversive views were 

 published. Mr. T. W. Gann discourses on the ancient 

 monuments of Honduras and on the natives now living 

 there. In technology there is a beautifully illustrated 

 papei le Mr. D. Randall-Maclver on the manufacture of 

 pottery in Upper Egypt. Mr. N. W. Thomas enumi rates 

 (!e varieties of the canoes and rafts in Australia and their 

 distribution. Mr. E. B. Haddon, in a well illustrated 

 paper on the dog-motive in Bornean art, discusses the 

 origin and degeneration of certain designs. Religion is 

 represented by notes by Mr. R. E. Dennett on the philo- 

 sophy of Bavili of Luango, West Africa. Finally, a report 

 on the ethnology of the Stlatlumh, one of the Salish tribes 

 of British Columbia, by Mr. C. Hill Tout, is a good 

 example of a paper on regional ethnography. It will be 

 seen that the journal maintains its high standard, both for 

 the quality of its matter and the excellence of its illus- 

 trations. 



A GAS CALORIMETER. 

 THE > paper on a new gas calorimeter which was read 

 1 before the Royal Society by Mr. C. V. Boys, F.R.S., 

 on December 7, 1905, is of interest, partly on account of 

 the causes which led to the design, and partly on account 

 uf the features which are original. 



The agitation of the gas companies in favour of re- 

 ducing the candle-power of gas on the ground that gas 

 of lower candle-power is cheaper while the diminution of 

 the light afforded by a luminous flame is of little con- 

 sequence as incandescent lighting is so largely used, while 

 i! has succeeded in many cases in getting the statutory 

 lighting power reduced, has on the other band raised tin 

 question whether the value of the gas for heating purposes 



