Fune 2, 1870] 
NATURE 
83 
By holding and moving the smoking ends of the rags 
over the face of the bees and blowing the smoke among 
them, they run helter skelter down amongst the combs 
far more afraid than hurt. Now he can carry the hive 
round the garden under his arm without being stung. When- 
ever the bees are likely to rise they should be dosed again. 
The bee-keeper will now find he has got the mastery over 
his bees, and can do what he likes with them. He will be 
able to drive them out of a hive full of combs into an 
empty one, and moreover shake them back, or tumble 
them back, or spoonful them back into the old hive or 
another, as men take peas from one basket to another. 
The smoke does not injure the health of the bees, does not 
stop them from work more than two or three minutes, and 
the use of it is so simple, easy, and efficacious, that we 
have no wish to find anything better for stupefying bees,” 
Hives, their material, size and position ; their covers, 
boards, supers, ekes and nadirs ; the times and modes of 
swarming bees artificially ; how to feed them, and how to 
take the honey ; how to combine separate hives, and how 
best to preserve them during winter, with many other 
details of bee-management, will be found so fully and 
clearly described, and with such good reasons for every 
step, that we think this work may do much to render 
profitable beekeeping far more common than it seems to 
be at present. A. R. WALLACE 
Matlacologia del Mar Rosso. Arturo Issel. With 
five lithographed plates. (Pisa, 1869.) 
WE have lately read and heard much about that great 
undertaking, the Suez Canal, and of its being the means 
of facilitating the commerce of the human race in Europe 
and India. Something may also be said as to the inter- 
change of the marine fauna of the Mediterranean and Red 
Sea, which will probably result from this artificial mode of 
communication. Geology teaches us that these two seas 
were once (in the post-tertiary or quaternary period) con- 
nected by a natural channel; for several species of shells 
now inhabiting the Mediterranean, and common there, 
occur in a fossil state throughout the Isthmus or Desert 
of Suez. These are :—Arca Noa, A. lactea, var. erythrea, 
Donax trunculus, Solecurtus strigilatus, Gastrochena 
dubia, Patella cerulea, Calyptr@a Chinensis, Nassa 
mutabilis, N costulata, Murex trunculus,var., and Cyprea 
annulus. Now it is a remarkable fact that scarcely any 
species ina living state are common to the Mediterranean 
and the Red Sea, even after making every allowance for 
the range of local variation, Dr. R. A. Philippi, indeed, 
in the second volume of his admirable work on the Mol- 
lusca of the Two Sicilies (published in 1844), gave a list 
of all the marine shells which he had examined in the col- 
lection made by Hemprich and Ehrenberg in the Red Sea; 
and of these he identified no less than 75 species as living 
both in the Mediterranean andthe Red Sea. According 
to him the number of Red Sea species found by Hemp- 
rich and Ehrenberg was 408. But it now appears that 
these explorers collected at Alexandria also on their way 
home, and that by some carelessness or mischance many 
of the labels indicating the localities got intermixed ; so 
that no reliance could be placed on the collection in a 
geographical point of view when it was examined by 
Philippi. 
The present work gives 574 recent or living species, of 
which 64 are for the first time described and 34 figured. 
As might be expected, nearly all are tropical and belong 
to the Indian Ocean. Besides these, 232 fossil species are 
enumerated, 25 being described as new to science, and 31 
figured. ‘The author collected 191 species on the shore 
at Suez in the spring of 1865 ; 141 were collected by the 
Marquis G. M. Arconati in the Gulf of Akaba, as well as 
at Suez ; public museums and private cabinets at Berlin, 
Paris, Pisa, Turin, and Genoa furnished additional mate- 
rial; while the catalogues of Ehrenberg, Riippel, and 
Vaillant, with the descriptions and plates of Philippi, 
8vo. 
Reeve, Sowerby, Kiener, and others, served for comparison 
and reference. Professor Issel is again gone to Suez for 
the purpose of continuing this interesting and useful re- 
search, His figures are very good, drawn on tinted paper. 
All general conchologists ought to possess the work. 
I may remark that one of the Red Sea species (Cecum 
anniulatum) here stated to inhabit “ Aden, Indie occiden- 
tali, Irlanda, Inghilterra”—the last two localities being, on 
the authority of Brown, Forbes and Hanley, and Philip 
Carpenter—has been only found in Great Britain among 
the sand from bath-sponges ! 
It should be known that Mr. M‘Andrew dredged for 
several months last year in the Gulf of Suez, when he 
made a very extensive collection of Mollusca, including a 
great number of then undescribed species. 1 hope he will 
soon publish his discoyeries. No one is more competent 
to do so. 
J. GwyN JEFFREYS 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
[ The Lditor does not hold himself responsible for opinions expressed 
by his Correspondents, No notice is taken of anonymous 
communications. | 
The New Natural History Museum 
I AM informed that the plan of fitting a museum with cases 
sealed on the side facing the public galleries, alluded to in last 
week’s NATURE, was suggested by Dr, Hooker, in an aniicle 
signed ‘f A Metropolitan Naturalist,” in the Gardener's Chronicle 
for 1858, p. 749, which also contains many other good sugges- 
tions as to the requirements of the museum. 
W. H, FLower 
The “English Cyclopedia” 
In my youth I took in ** The Penny Cyclopadia,” in my 
manhood I purchased its progeny, ‘* The English Cyclopzedia,” 
and now, in comparative old age, I have acquired two supple- 
mentary volumes to the latter ; and I have never had reason to 
complain of any of these books, until the supplement to the 
Natural History division appeared a month or two ago. This 
supplement embraces a period of sixteen years, from 1854 to 
1870, during which, probably, more good scientific work has 
been accomplished than in any preceding half-century. Many 
subjects on which I expected to find important articles are 
passed over without a reference, and others are, as I shall 
endeavour to show, treated of in a most imperfect and unsatis- 
factory manner. 
I looked in vain for articles on (1) Acclimatisation, (2) Ants, 
(on which Bates, Lespes, Lincecum, Norton, F, Smith, 
Sumichrast, and many others have written since 1854), (3) 
A.xolotl (whose remarkable metamorphoses have been studied by 
Dumeril and others), (4) Cephalopoda (on which much has been 
written since the Cyclopedia article appeared, when the 
Tectocotylus had not become a subject of discussion), (5) 
Darwinism, (6) Deep-sea Dredging, (7) Dimorphism in the 
Animal Kingdom, (8) LEophyton, (9) LEozcon, (10) Lugerion 
(a fossil insect that from its puzzling form has been compared 
with the Archzeopteryx), (11) Zizgous Origin of Diseases, 
the cholera-fungus, scarlatina-fungus, ague-fungus, the fungi 
in skin-diseases, &c., and (12) Hyalonema (on which several 
articles holding the most opposite views haye lately appeared) ; 
(13) LLvbridity in animals and plants (on which Broca, Masters and 
others have written elaborate works, and on which, as in the case 
of rabbits and hares, many remarkable experiments have been 
made), (14) Mimicry in the Animal Kingdom, (15) Monera, (16) 
Ornithoscelida, (17) Parthenogenesis (on which, during the last 
sixteen years, there have been published Siebold’s ‘‘True Par- 
thenogenesis in Lepidoptera and Bees,” Owen ‘‘On Partheno- 
genesis,” Leuckart ‘‘On the recognition of Parthenogenesis in 
Insects,” De Quatrefages’ ‘‘Metamorphoses of Man and the 
lower Animals,” and the contributions of Huxley and Lubbock to 
Transactions of the Linnean Society and to the Philosophical 
