I06 



NATURE 



[July 28, 19 10 



as follows. One evening some years since my father, Mr. 

 Joel Powers, while walking on Lawrence St., Lowell, 

 .Massachusetts, saw a brilliant shooting star or meteor flash 

 downward through the atmosphere, striking the earth quite 

 near him. He found it upon investigation to be a jelly- 

 like mass, and almost intolerably offensive in smell. I 

 have often heard my father allude to this event, which 

 greatly interested him, he being a close observer and an 

 extensive reader. 



" Respectfully }'ours, 



" Ellen M. Adams." 



While I am of the opinion that the mass found by Mr. 

 Powers had no connection with the meteor that he saw, 

 it may be well to put this piece of evidence on record in 

 view of Prof. Hughes's paper. 



Frank Schlesinoer. 



Allegheny Observatory, July 12. 



s 



THE ETHNOLOGY, BOTANY, GEOLOGY, AND 

 METEOROLOGY OF GERMAN AFRICA.' 

 .^OAIE lime ago, revieuing a scientific treatise on 

 -^ German South-west Africa and the adjoining re- 

 gions 1 ventured to make the remark in this journal 

 that Germany deserved to be allowed to take under her 

 control still more of the undeveloped portions of the 

 earth's surface, provided she continued by the direct 

 action of her Government to enrich the world's store 

 of knowledge as she has been doing with her African 

 and New Guinea researches during the last ten years. 

 The present " Mitteilungen " support this e.xordium ; 

 they are of high scientific value. 



There is, firstly, a separate volume by Dr. Weule 

 on his ethnographical observations in the south-east 

 parts of German East Africa. Her6, for the modest 

 sum of three shillings (three marks), one gets a 

 splendidly illustrated work of first-rate importance on 

 a section of Bantu .\frica. " Erganzungsheft Nr. 2 " 

 is a dissertation by Prof. Dr. Carl Uhlig on the carto- 

 graphy of the German portion of the Rift Valley 

 region of equatorial East -Africa, with an appendi.x 

 on the orthography of place-names in .Masailand, &c., 

 by Dr. Bernhard Struck. Part i. of Band .xxii. 

 deals with the journeys in 11)05-6 of Franz Seiner in 

 the still very little explored country between the Kala- 

 hari Desert and the Upper Zambezi (especially the 

 valleys of the Okavango, Kwando, and Omuramba 

 rivers); part ii., with the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, the 

 rainfall and meteorology of the Cameroons and of 

 German South-west .\frica; part iii., likewise with 

 the exploration of the upper parts of Kilimanjaro, the 

 rainfall of Togoland, and the geography of Ponape 

 Island; andpart iv., with the volcanoes recentlv active 

 on the Cameroons Mountains, the rainfall and ineteor- 

 ology of the Cameroons and of the Logone River 

 (Sh.'iri district),, the Paresis Mountains of South- 

 west .Africa, and the meteorology of the German 

 possessions in the Pacific. The space, however, 

 which is attributed in this collection to the German 

 oceanic territories is so small that no further allusion 

 to them need be made (other than to praise very 

 cnrdiallv the extremelv interesting map of Ponape 

 Island in the Carolines Protectorate), and we might 

 proceed at once to discuss the valuable additions to 

 our knowledge of Africa contained in these six sec- 

 tions of the scientific reports attached to the Deutschen 

 Kolonialblatte. 



Dr. Weule's work in East .-Xfrican anthropology has 

 already been made known to English readers by Miss 

 Alice Werner in a translation of his more " popular " 

 account of his travels and in various papers in the 

 Journal of the (British) .African Society. It was re- 



' Mitteilungen aus den Deutschen Schut?qebieten, &<;. F.rganziingshe''ten 

 Nr. I, pp. x + i5o+Tafel63; unti 2, op. iv+6r Heften i. bis ;v., Band xx'i. 

 Edited by Dr. Freiherr von Danckelmann. (Berlin : Ernst Siegfried Mittler 

 und Sohn, 1909.) Ptice 3 marks each. 



NO. 2126, VOL. 84] 



marked in one or other of these publications that 

 Dr. Weule's work was a little impaired by his ap- 

 parent unacquaintance with his subject before embark- 

 ing on this expedition lo East .Africa. Had he 

 studied more the numerous works in German and in 

 English dealing with the native tribes of the southern 

 portions of German East Africa and of British Nyasa- 

 land, he would Iiave avoided a certain jiaivcte ot dis- 

 covering what had already been made known and 

 a few blunders into which he had fallen through a 

 lack of comparative knowledge ; also that his ortho- 

 graphy of native names was a little old-fashioned (in 

 its German rendering) and divergent from the methods- 

 of spelling adopted long ago by German and British 

 philologists and travellers. 



These criticisms are less applicable to the volume 

 under notice, " Wissenschaftliche ergebnisse meiner 

 ethnographischen Forschungsreise in den sudosteni 

 Deutsch-Ostafrikas " ; though the orthography still 

 irritates and the many painstaking quotations of 

 native speech in the dialects of Vao and Makua would 

 have been the better for careful revision with German 

 or British experts. (They tend to incorporate toO' 

 much the Swahili words of some intervening inter- 

 preter.) But the greater part of this book is interest- 

 ing and valuable to the ethnologist. The illustrations- 

 which accompany it are deserving of unstinted praise. 

 Photographically (for the most part) and by clever 

 draughtsmanship, Dr. Weule depicts the physical 

 types of the Wa-mwera, A^-makua, Wa-yao, Wa- 

 makonde, Wa-matambwe, and Wa-ngoni peoples of 

 the Ruvuma basin ; their costumes, ornaments, and 

 hideous self-inflicted deformities (such as the 

 monstrous "pelele," or lip-disc, worn by nearly all 

 the women in this region) ; their houses and methods 

 of building ; their graves, fetish-huts, granaries, cook- 

 ing arrangements, doors, wooden locks and keys-, 

 pottery-making, metal-work, bark-cloth felting, basket- 

 and mat-making, salt-straining; their weaving of 

 cotton cloth and remarkable wood carving and cala- 

 bash engravintr. Indeed, he reveals a new chapter in 

 negro art bv his illustrations of their statues in wood, 

 their clay dolls, their sculptured birds, Rhynchocyon 

 insectivores, pigs, monkeys, and dogs ; their most 

 artistic carved snuff-boxes, amulets, powder-boxes, 

 spoons, and stools. (As regards the last it is interest- 

 ing to note the striking resemblance in shape and 

 design to those of the south-eastern basin of the 

 Congo.) One arises from this survey (and after read- 

 ing the accompanying text) convinced that with due 

 encouragement some section of the negro race is 

 going to astonish the world yet in design and sculp- 

 ture. 



Then there are the extraordinarily ingenious traps, 

 snares, and pitfalls, all most clearly and yet pictur- 

 esquely illustrated. Elephants are sometimes killed 

 by the falling of a heavilv-weighted harpoon from a 

 lofty tree-branch or scaffold which they release by the 

 displacing of a cord; the larger antelopes similarly 

 discharge arrows or assagais into their own bodies; 

 the smaller quadrupeds dislodge in their passage a 

 heavy beam which falls and crushes them. There are 

 springes and nooses for the capture and strangling 

 of beasts and birds, and cages for catching them 

 alive; rat-traps and hvena-traps. .All these displav an 

 ingenuity, .1 neat-handedness, and an unconscious 

 knowledge of dynamics very remarkable in peoole still 

 living ostensiblv as semi-savages. One realises in 

 studying Dr. Weule's work how it was that, although 

 the fossil remains of Homo primii;cn!iis — and the 

 negro stands hipher as a subsoecies of Homo sapiens 

 — exhibit an osteology approximating slightly to the 

 anthropoid apes, yet the brain capacitv of any type 

 of the genus Homo is almost of necessity an average 



