i6 



NATURE 



[July 7, 1910 



The tenth International Geographical Congress is to be 

 held in Rome on October 15 to 22, 191 1. The congress 

 will be divided into eight sections, and communications 

 may be made in Italian, French, German, or English. 

 Abstracts of papers proposed for presentation to the meet- 

 ing must be sent in not later than April 30, igii, and 

 reports on subjects brought before previous congresses or 

 suggested by the executive subcommittee must be received 

 not later than August 31, igii. The president of the 

 congress is the Marquis Raffaele Cappelli, president of the 

 Italian Geograpliical Society. 



."VccoRDiNG to Science, plans for the extension of the 

 American Museum of Natural History are being prepared 

 by the trustees. The present building, erected between 

 1874 and igoS, includes eight units, and the plans now in 

 preparation contemplate an additional six units, com- 

 pleting the central hall, the east and west transepts, the 

 east entrance pavilion, and the south-east fagade. 



A SOCIETY called the Christopher S. Ledentzoff 

 Society for the Development of Experimental Sciences and 

 their Practical Applications has been formed in connec- 

 tion with the Moscow Imperial Technical School, the 

 objects of which are to assist discoveries and experiments 

 in connection with natural science ; to develop technical 

 inventions and improvements ; to investigate and apply to 

 practical use any scientific or technical discovery or 

 improvement. The society expresses the hope that its 

 aims will attract the notice of all similar institutions and 

 persons working in scientific and technical spheres, and 

 appeals for assistance to all such institutions and persons 

 for any support which might be given by (a) interchange 

 of correspondence ; (b) a supply of lists of privileges and 

 patents, and reports on scientific and technical subjects. 

 Further particulars as to the aims of the society may be 

 obtained from the secretary, care of the Imperial Technical 

 Si hool, Moscow. 



A GEOGRAPliic.\L society, called the Servian Geographical 

 Society, has been established at Belgrade. Its first presi- 

 dent is Prof. J. Cvijic. The society proposes to begin the 

 publication of a quarterly journal in January next. 



The Institute of Chemistry of Great Britain and Ireland 

 gives notice of the following examinations : — in biological 

 chemistry, bacteriology, fermentation and enzyme action, 

 with special reference to the chemistry and bacteriology of 

 food-stuffs, water-supply and sewage disposal, and the 

 application of biological chemistry to industries and manu- 

 factures, beginning on Monday, October 17 next ; in 

 chemical technology in October next, the exact date to be 

 announced later. 



Speaking in the House of Commons on Wednesday of 

 last week on the Colonial Office Vote, Colonel Seely, the 

 Under-Secretary for the Colonies, referred to the sub- 

 ject of sleeping sickness, and the work that has been 

 done or is in progress in combating it. Coincident 

 with the coming of the white man there had been, he 

 said, a spread of various diseases. The spread of sleep- 

 ing sickness alone had been most remarkable and 

 disastrous. How many persons had died they did not 

 know, but that hundreds of thousands had died they did 

 know. Tremendous efforts had been made by many 

 countries, and he thought we might claim especially by 

 this country, to remove this great scourge. Sir David 

 Bruce went, with his wife, into the heart of the plague- 

 stricken country, and spent many months there investi- 

 gating this great scourge of sleeping sickness. Almost 

 every person in the place where he lived was suffering in 

 some degree from this sickness, and when he told the 

 NO. 2123, VOL. 84] 



House that, out of the hundreds of thousands of cases, 

 they did not know of a single case of recovery, he thought 

 they would realise to how great an extent those who tried 

 to deal with the disease took their lives in their hands 

 when they went out to these countries. He had mentioned 

 Sir David Bruce, but there were many others. Some had 

 already died in this great cause, and their names were, 

 alas ! already forgotten. But when the history of brave 

 deeds came to be written, the deeds of those men who had 

 gone into the heart of Africa to try to combat this 

 insidious and most fatal of all diseases would not be for- 

 gotten, and would perhaps be considered as giving more 

 striking proof of the ability of men to overcome natural 

 fear than almost anything else in the annals of mankind. 

 We now knew that these diseases were caused by flies, 

 but the difficulty of finding a remedy was immense. It 

 was thought that the removal of the natives from the 

 infested areas might prove a remedy. Sleeping sickness 

 was caused by the tsetse-fly, and it was thought that if 

 the population could be removed from the shores of the 

 lakes where alone that fly could live, they would be cured. 

 Unfortunately, that had not proved to be entirely the case. 

 But still we did know a great deal more than we did 

 before about the origin and cause of sleeping sickness, and 

 we had checked the mortality to a most remarkable 

 degree. 



Dr. W. L. Duckworth and Mr. \V. J. Pocock con- 

 tribute to vol. xiv. of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society's 

 Proceedings for the current year a paper on a collection 

 of human bones found in the course of excavations on the 

 site of an Augustinian Friary near the Corn Market, Cam- 

 bridge. Among these appear specimens of a tall, broad- 

 headed race which may be assigned to the British Bronze- 

 age type, to early Danish immigrants of the Borreby class, 

 or to later arrivals from a southerly region, perhaps 

 Normandy or Burgundy, these last being foreign ecclesi- 

 astics who founded the Cambridge Friary. After full dis- 

 cussion of the question, Dr. Duckworth favours the last 

 explanation. An excavation at Durham supplies similar 

 relics of foreign bishops, and the proportion of these broad- 

 headed men is too great to be provided by the local 

 medi£Eval population, which, though it doubtless contained 

 individuals of the Bronze-age type, was yet, on the whole, 

 characterised by a very large majority of individuals with 

 distinctly narrow heads. 



Mr. W. Morfitt has been for some time engaged in 

 the examination of a series of pit-dwellings accidentally 

 discovered in the district of Holderness, in the East Riding 

 of Yorkshire. Canon Greenwell and Mr. R. .'\. Gatty 

 contribute an account of these discoveries to the June issue 

 of Man. The people occupying this district, much of 

 which, since their time, has been destroyed by encroach- 

 ments of the sea, were evidently a very early Neolithic 

 race, probably an early branch of that which introduced 

 polished stone implements. Those which they possessed 

 are almost Palaeolithic in character. The fauna, however, 

 which consisted of Bos longifrons, the horse, sheep or 

 goat, hog, and red deer, is distinctly Neolithic. The only 

 evidence of their acquaintance with the sea is the vertebra 

 of a whale, which, on the analogy of the Guachos of the 

 River Plate, Prof. Boyd Dawkins supposes to have been 

 used as a seat. 



The Takelma language, one of the distinct linguistic 

 stocks of America, is now nearly extinct, being spoken by 

 only a few survivors of the tribe in the Siletz Reservation, 

 western Oregon. It is therefore fortunate that Mr. E. 

 Sapir, working under the direction of the American Bureau 

 of Ethnology, has been able to secure the record of a con- 



