December 5, 1907] 



'NA TURE 



Collections" in those departments; and his donations 

 appear to be limited to a few river crustaceans. Dr. 

 Bovallius was the recipient of several decorations from his 

 own and foreign sovereigns, among these being the Grand 

 Cross of the Order of Isabella Catholica and the knight- 

 hood of the Danish Order of the Dannebrog, and of the 

 Portuguese Order of St. lago. 



The ascidians collected on the coast of California by 

 the U.S. Fisheries steamer AXbaUoss during the summer 

 of 1904 include a number of new species, which are de- 

 scribed by Mr. W. E. Ritter in the Zoological Publications 

 of California University, vol. iv.. No. i. 



The greater portion of the October issue of the American 

 XattiraJist is occupied by a paper by Mr. A. W. Grabau 

 on orthogenetic variation C'.e- variation along definite 

 lines) in the shells of gastropod molluscs. Among the 

 points discussed are the mode of arrangement and develop- 

 ment of ribs and spines on the shell. 



To Messrs. Witherby and Co. we are indebted for a 

 copy of an illustrated pamphlet entitled " Gilbert White 

 of Selborne." The te.\t formed the subject of a lecture 

 delivered before the Hastings and St. Leonards Natural 

 History Society in June last by Mr. W. H. Mullens. The 

 illustrations include several views of Selborne village, and 

 one of the interior of the church. A good summary of 

 the chief features of White's career will be found in this 

 well-got-up pamphlet, of which the price is half-a-crown. 



In No. 1567 (vol. xxxiii., pp. 197-228) of the Proceed- 

 ings of the U..S. National Museum, Lord Walsingham 

 describes a number of new North American moths of the 

 tineid group, with the addition of a list of genera of the 

 family Blastobasida;. The specimens on which the deter- 

 minations are based were in part supplied by the U.S. 

 Museum and U.S. Department of Agriculture, and in part 

 contained in the author's own collection. Types of most 

 of the new species are now in the U.S. Museum. Soft 

 river-tortoises (Trionychidse) from various Tertiary horizons 

 in the United States form the subject of a paper by Mr. 

 O. P. Hay published in the Bulletin of the American 

 Museum of Natural History, vol. xxxii., pp. 847-863. 



To the November issue of the Zoologist Mr. W. L. 

 Distant, the editor, contributes the second and concluding 

 part of his article on the extermination of animals, deal- 

 ing in this instance with the destruction dealt by man. 

 .Vfter referring to the destruction of African antelopes and 

 quaggas for the sake of their hides, the author quotes a 

 statement to the effect that in the twenty years from 1856 

 to 1876 Africa supplied Europe with an annual average of 

 1,500,000 lb. of ivory, in addition to 250,000 lb. exported 

 to India and about 150,000 lb. to America, this represent- 

 ing the destruction of about 51,000 elephants. Another 

 item which bulks very large is the toll of alligators killed 

 in Florida for their hides, this being estimated at no less 

 than two and a half millions. In Australia, again, we 

 find a flock-owner boasting that in the course of eighteen 

 monihs he had killed, on his own estate, 64,000 of the 

 smaller marsupials, such as wallabies and kangaroo-rats, 

 in addition to several thousand kangaroos. As the author 

 well remarks, no species can stand such wastage long, and 

 kangaroos and their kin must apparently be exterminated 

 as wild animals at no very distant date. 



To vol. xvi. of the Anales of the National Museum of 

 Buenos Aires Dr. F. .Ameghino contributes no less than 

 '35 pages of " preliminary notes " on an atlas vertebra 

 and imperfect femur (which, so far as we see, may or 



NO. iq88, VOL. yj] 



may not be associated) from the later Tertiary deposits 

 of Monte Herraosa. On these two specimens, coupled 

 with certain alleged evidence of the existence of an in- 

 telligent being at the time the Monte Hermoso strata 

 were deposited, he considers himself justified in naming 

 a new genus and species — Tetraproihomo argciitintis — of 

 the family Hominidae. Nor is this all, for in the latter 

 part of the paper he publishes a series of phylogenies in 

 which the Ungulata and Primates, together with the 

 Patagonian extinct Carnivora, are derived from a single 

 South American ancestral type, the Microbiotheriidae, a 

 group which most paljeontologists now regard as insepar- 

 able from the opossums. On a later page we are furnished 

 with the names of a number of non-existent connecting 

 links between " Tetraprothomo " and man and gibbons 

 on the one hand, and earlier forms on the other. It may 

 be added that in one of the hypothetical genera is in- 

 cluded the Neanderthal man under the name of Prothomo 

 ti canderthalensis. 



The fifth annual report of the Horninian Museum and 

 Library, Forest Hill, S.E., dealing with the work of the 

 year 1906, has been issued. The museum is intended to 

 be a teaching institution where the general public, 

 students, and school children may be able to inspect 

 properly labelled specimens exhibited in related series. 

 Saturday morning lectures for teachers and afternoon 

 lectures for the general public have been held with much 

 success. The report contains illustrations of some of the 

 models made by the museum naturalist to illustrate natural 

 phenomena. Among these are diagrammatic models of 

 coral reefs designed to illustrate the manner in which they 

 are built up and the effects of currents on the growth of 

 the reefs. Useful though these models are, their scientific 

 value would have been increased had they been modelled 

 to a true scale, and some indication of the scale given. 



The Bulletin of the Johns Hopkins Hospital for 

 November (xviii., No. 200) contains an interesting paper 

 by Dr. Arthur Meyer on the physician and surgeon in 

 Shakespeare. 



The pages of the Journal of Hygiene for October (vii., 

 No. 5) arc mainly occupied with two papers on ship beri- 

 beri and scurvy by Prof. Hoist and Dr. Frolich. It is 

 stated that ship beri-beri is closely connected with food, 

 and shows a marked congruence with scurvy. By keeping 

 animals on certain diets, conditions were produced simu- 

 lating human scurvy very closely. The etiology of 

 tropical beri-beri is considered to be outside the field of 

 these investigations. 



The reports of the Board of Health, New South Wales, 

 on the outbreaks of plague at Sydney are important con- 

 tributions to the epidemiology of this disease, and show 

 conclusively the interdependence of the rat and plague. 

 The latest report, by Dr. .-^shburton Thompson, deals with 

 the si.xth outbreak, which occurred in 1906. A continuous' 

 outlook is kept for infection in rats, large numbers of 

 which are caught and examined. In the fifth outbreak, in 

 1905, the last case of plague in man occurred on July 12, 

 and the last plague-infected rat was identified on 

 December 5. In 1906, the. first plague-rat was identified on 

 January 23, the first case in man occurred on March 12, 

 the last on December 22, and the last plague-rat was 

 identified on December 29. From December 6, 1905, to 

 January 22, 1906, 3225 rats and mice were examined anij 

 found to be plague-free. During the epizootic period, 

 January 23 to December 29, igo6, 27,731 rats and mice 

 were examined, among which plague was identified in 



