48 
NATURE 
Sia Gaal 21, 1916 
The book is well printed and the reproduction 
of the plates excellent, the price is exceedingly 
moderate, and we can recommend the work as 
an excellent one for the beginner. 
Tunbridge Wells and Neighbourhood. Edited by 
H. R. ‘Knipe. Pp. 207. (Tunbridge Wells: 
Pelton, 1916.) 
Tus volume is a welcome addition to the series 
of local surveys which owe their origin to the 
annual congress of the South-Eastern Union of 
Scientific Societies. The series was begun by the 
“Survey and. Record of Woolwich and West 
Kent,”’ which was published in commemoration 
of the twelfth congress of the Union, held at 
Woolwich in 1907; and later surveys have been 
issued in connection with the congresses held at 
St. Albans, Hampstead, and Bournemouth. The 
present volume makes a notable addition to the 
series, despite the fact that, owing to the war, it 
has been brought out under special difficulties. 
The South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies 
is heartily to be congratulated.on these surveys. 
They are all of them confessedly provisional; but 
if they are made the basis of patient and con- 
tinued work, and if they open out beyond the 
biological and archeological fields to the civic and 
sociological fields as well, they will mark a great 
step forward in the much-needed development of 
regional survey. Two lines of development readily 
suggest themselves: that each year all the 
affiliated societies in the area in which the annual 
congress of the Union is to meet should map out 
in good time the contributions already available 
for a local survey and the ground which still 
requires to be surveyed; and that, after the 
-annual congress has met, further work should be 
organised and the results printed at intervals 
uniformly with the congress volume, and so be 
readily incorporated. 
There is always an abundant demand for guide- 
books of the popular and familiar kinds, but we 
see no reason why many towns and districts 
should not gradually provide themselves and their 
visitors with regional surveys, progressively 
developing in scope, exhaustiveness, and accuracy, 
and forming guide-books of a higher and a more 
intelligent order.. Mr. Knipe and his collaborators 
are to be heartily congratulated on having pro- 
vided the first draft of such a guide-book for Tun- 
bridge Wells and neighbourhood. Cone: 
Through South Westland. A Journey to the 
Haast and Mount Aspiring, New Zealand. By 
A. Maud Moreland. Second Edition. Pp. xviii 
+222. (London and Melbourne, Christchurch, 
Wellington and Dunedin: Whitcombe and 
Tombs, Ltd., n.d.) Price 6s. net. 
Tuis entertaining description of a five weeks’ 
riding tour in South Island, New Zealand, gives 
an excellent impression of the character ‘of. the 
country traversed and much information as to 
the kindly disposition of the inhabitants. Both the 
text and the beautiful photographs with which the 
volume is provided will interest students of the 
geography and natural history of New Zealand. 
NO. 2447, VOL. 98] 
———— ae 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
[The Editor does not hold himself responsible for 
Opinions expressed by his correspondents. Neither 
can he undertake to return, or to correspond with 
the writers of, rejected manuscripts intended for 
shis or any other part of Nature. No notice is 
taken of anonymous communications.] 
Life Assurance Tables. ee 
Your article in Nature for July 6, pp. 383-4, quotes ‘ 
me correctly “that life assurance business has been 
based upon mortality tables which represented the ex- 
pectation of life under the relatively unhealthy condi- 
tions which existed a half-century ago"’; and then, a 
few sentences later, the article makes the above quota- 
tion credit me with saying that the mortality tables 
were published ‘a half-century ago’’—which I did not 
say. 
Your article explains that the mortality table pub- 
lished in 1rg01, now in use by the assurance companies 
(of Great Britain ?), is based upon mortalities observed 
by sixty assurance companies under the relatively un- 
healthy conditions which existed during the thirty 
years 1863 to 1893—that is, from more than “a half- 
century ago" (fifty-three years) to twenty-three years 
ago, an average of thirty-eight years ago. It is within 
the last thirty-eight years that the great advances in 
preventive and curative medicine (excepting vaccina- 
tion) have been made. 
The American Experience Table was compiled by 
Homans in the year 1868, and was based chiefly ‘upon 
the mortality data of the Mutual Life Insurance Com- 
pany of New York. These data therefore represent 
the relatively unhealthy conditions which existed in a 
period of time averaging considerably more than “a 
half-century ago.’’ As the writers of the article on 
life insurance in the last edition of the ‘‘ Encyclopzedia 
Britannica” (p. 666, second column) say, the American 
Experience Table ‘‘is now in wider use than any other 
for computing the premiums of American companies.” 
It therefore seems that my sentence, quoted in the first 
paragraph, thoroughly respected the value of under- 
statement. W. W. CAMPBELL. * 
Lick Observatorv, 
August 7. 
Pre-Columbian Use of the Money-Cowrie in America. 
In Nature of August 10 (p. 488) there was a notice 
of an article by Mr. C. B, Moore (published in the 
Journal of the Academy of Natural Science of Phila- 
delphia, 2nd Ser., part il., vol. xvi.) on the explorations 
of aboriginal sites in the Tennessee River valley, which 
raises the interesting question of the provenance of 
certain cowries found there. These are pronounced by 
Dr. H. A. Pilsbry, the well-known American con- 
chologist, to be examples of the money-cowrie, Cypraea 
moneta, of Eastern Seas, and they have never been 
recorded before from an aboriginal mound in the 
United States. Nor has the species ever been re- 
corded living on any of the shores of the Americas. 
To account for their presence in the Tennessee mound, 
Dr. W. H. Dall, another of America’s leading con- 
chologists, has suggested that the cowries ‘‘may have 
come off one of Columbus’s own ships’’! 
In the Peabody Museum, Cambridge, Mass., is the 
dress of a Cree woman, collected by the Lewis and 
Clark Expedition, 1804-5, on which are four dozen 
cowries of the dwarf variety atava of C. moneta (see 
American Anthropologist, 1905, for picture). 
Willoughby believes these cowries were sold to the 
Indians by the Hudson Bay Company in the late 
eighteenth or early nineteenth century. 
Montgomery (Transactions of the Canadian lastitnte; 
i 
2 
