282 
NATURE 
[Marcu 3, 1923 

professional careers it describes. On the death of 
Baillie, whom Sir William Osler regarded as in many 
ways the most distinguished possessor of the cane, 
his widow gave it to Sir Henry Halford, who presented 
it to the Royal College of Physicians, in the library 
of which it now reposes. 
The memoirs of the cane give a vivid account 
of the social and professional life of the leading 
London physicians in the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries, including descriptions of the early meetings 
of the Royal Society. Of special interest 1s the 
life of Dr. Mead, of whom it is said that “of all 
physicians he gained the most, spent the most, and 
enjoyed the highest fame not only in his own but in 
foreign countries.” Apart from their professional 
attainments, Mead and Askew were highly accomplished 
scholars and ardent bibliophiles, the extent of their 
acquisitions being shown by the fact that the sale of 
Mead’s library took twenty-eight days and that of the 
Bibliotheca Askeviana twenty days. The real author 
of “The Gold-Headed Cane” was Dr., afterwards 
Sir William Macmichael, censor to the College of 
Physicians on two and subsequently 
physician-in-ordinary to the King. Macmichael also 
wrote a small and entertaining volume entitled “ Lives 
of British Physicians.” The first edition of “The 
Gold-Headed Cane ” was published in 1827, two years 
after the opening of the present home of the Royal 
College of Physicians in Pall Mall, and the second 
edition appeared the following year. A third edition 
was published in 1884, or forty-five years after 
Macmichael’s death, by Dr. William Munk, registrar 
of the College, who continued the narrative down 
to 1871. ; 
occasions 

Frontier Tribes of Assam. 
The Lhota Nagas. By J. P. Mills. With an Intro- 
duction and Supplementary Notes by J. H. Hutton. 
(Published by direction of the Government of Assam.) 
Pp. xxxix+255. (London: Macmillan and Co., 
Ltd-si922.) 2 
5s. net. 
R. MILLS’S monograph on the Lhota Nagas is 
MI a worthy supplement to the accounts of the 
Angami and Sema branches of the Naga tribes published 
by the enterprise and liberality of the Government of 
Assam, and written by Mr. J. H. Hutton, who has 
contributed a valuable introduction and notes to the 
present work, The volume contains a full description, 
pressed down and running over, of the life of this 
interesting people, who are now losing their identity 
by the influence of Christian and Hindu propaganda. 
A pleasant feature in the writer’s work is the sympathy 
he shows for this childlike people, fully reciprocated | 
NO. 2783, VOL. 111] 

by them, who showed their loyalty in the great war 
and claim to have defeated the Germans under the 
leadership of their white chief. 
The most important part of the book is the intro- 
duction, in which Mr. Hutton, with unrivalled know- 
ledge, sums up the latest conclusions on the ethnography 
of the Nagas. It gives a final blow to the methods 
pursued by the late Sir H. Risley and his school in 
dealing with the problems of Indian ethnology. Risley 
assumed that groups like Brahmans and Rajputs were 
homogeneous entities, and that it was possible by the 
measurement of a few skulls, collected haphazard, to 

From “‘ The Lhota Nagas.” 
Fic. 1.—A Lhota warrior in full dress. 
decide their position in his ethnological scheme. It 
has now been proved that these groups are in no sense 
homogeneous, and Mr. Hutton shows that the Naga 
tribes represent the convergence and assimilation of 
at least three streams of immigrants. ‘“ No Naga tribe 
is of pure blood, but the area which they inhabit has 
been the scene of immigrations from north-east, north- 
west, and south, and the different stocks introduced 
in this way have entered into their composition. 
Indeed, in view of the struggles that have taken place 
for the fertile plains of Burma to the east and India 
to the west, it is inevitable that some elements worsted 
in these struggles should have been pushed up into 
the hills.” This is good sense and well expressed, and 
there is now no justification for accepting a hasty, ill- 
etn rte 
er 
