
Marcu 4, 1915| 
NATURE 
“5 

report of the council that thirty additions had been 
made to the menagerie during January, of which 
twenty-two were acquired by presentation, one by pur- 
chase, and two by exchange, while three were received 
on deposit, and two were born in the gardens. Amongst 
these was a sing-sing waterbuck, a squirrel-monkey, 
a kinkajou, two Senegal genets, and a spotted fire- 
finch (Lagonosticta niveiguttata), the last a species 
new to the collection. 
In the reports on the Hunterian Collections in the 
University of Glasgow for 1913-14 it is stated that, 
in addition to a considerable number previously identi- 
fied, many type-specimens of insects described by 
Fabricius have been recognised recently, as well as a 
number of the specimens figured in Drury’s “ Illus- 
trations of Natural History,” and Olivier’s ‘‘ Ento- 
mologie,’’ 1789-1808. These the curator hopes may 
eventually be housed in a fireproof building. All the 
collections are reported to be in good condition; and 
in some instances have received considerable aug- 
mentation during the period under review. 
Next time the editor of My Children’s Magazine 
requires a picture of a whale he would be well advised 
to send his artist to the Natural History Museum 
instead of allowing him to evolve from his own mind 
the grotesque caricature of a sperm-whale (with upper 
teeth!) which forms the frontispiece to the March issue 
of that journal. The picture is intended to represent 
a whale stranded at Greenwich in the time of John 
Evelyn, by whom it was seen and measured. There 
is no proof that this was a sperm-whale, and it was 
much more probably a common rorqual (as is sug- 
gested by Evelyn’s mention of a “‘picked snout’), a 
species of which, a female, was stranded some twenty 
years ago at Woolwich, where it gave birth to a couple 
of young. Another error in the same issue is the 
statement that the wool used in the manufacture of 
““cashmere ”’ is the product of wild goats. 
Mr. C. F. Juritz contributes a paper on plant 
poisons of South African plants in vol. xi., No. 4, 
of the South African Journal of Science, which is of 
value in pointing out the pharmacological possibilities 
of the rich native flora. Interesting particulars are 
given of the toxic properties of the fruits of the 
Cycad, Encephalartos, various Liliaceae, and Amarylli- 
daceze, which are so numerous at the Cape, and of 
many other plants under their respective natural 
orders. 
Tue pocket-boolk for to15 issued by the Royal 
Botanic Society of London is a mine of miscellaneous 
and very useful information, giving not only the 
various horticultural fixtures for the year, but also 
such things as the different weights and measures and 
their conversion from one system to another, physical 
constants, chemical constituents of gems, the composi- 
tion of soils, manures and their uses for different 
Ikinds of trees and plants, and so on. Several pages 
are devoted to lists of economic plants with their 
botanical names, natural orders, and uses, which form 
a very handy source of reference. At the end there 
is a plan of a tennis-court and croquet-lawn, but the 
Badminton court, which might have found a place, is 
not included. 
NO. 2366, VOL. 95]|' 


JAPANESE primulas form the subject of an illus- 
trated article by Mr. Takeda in No. xxxvili., vol. 
vill., of Notes from the Royal Botanic Garden, Edin- 
burgh. Though China is the home par excellence 
of the genus, Japan, according to the present paper, 
possesses eleven native species. Of these P. Sieboldti 
and P. japonica are the best known. Hybridisation, 
which is uncommon, as a rule, in the genus, is 
common among the Japanese species, and P. Sie- 
boldii is conspicuous as a parent of many hybrids. 
In the same number of the Notes fifty new Chinese 
plants are described, collected by G. Forrest or 
F. K. Ward in West China at altitudes of from 12,000 
to 16,000 ft. Draba alpina, var. involucrata, from the 
Lichiang range at 15,000 to 16,000 ft., has been 
grown at the Edinburgh Botanic Garden. Other 
high-altitude plants are the gentians and saxifrages 
collected by F. K. Ward on the borders of Yunnan 
and Tibet up to 16,000 ft. 
THe Hawaiian Volcano Research Association is a 
society founded in 1909 and supported by voluntary 
contributions. Its objects are to record volcanic out- 
bursts and earthquakes in the Hawaiian Islands, and 
to offer opportunities to scientific men to pursue special 
studies in connection with volcanic action. The asso- 
ciation possesses a volcano observatory near the edge 
of the crater of Kilauea, and a seismological station 
at a short distance which is furnished with two Bosch- 
Omori tromometers, an Omori tromometer, and an 
Omori seismograph. Weekly bulletins are issued in 
which the continual changes within the craters are 
described and lists are given of the numerous earth- 
quakes recorded. An appeal for funds has recently 
been issued by the board of directors, partly for scien- 
tific objects, partly for the construction of stone refuge 
houses along the north-east rift line of Mauna Loa, as 
it is almost certain that an outflow of lava will shortly 
take place along that line. 
ATTENTION has been directed on more than one 
occasion in these columns to the need of journals pub- 
lishing summaries of current mathematical work in 
the form of lists of new books and of the contents of 
periodicals. This has been a feature of the Bulletin 
of the Calcutta Mathematical Society, which, however, 
has up till now reached us considerably out of date. 
The Tohoku Mathematical Journal (vol. vi.), published 
in Sendai, Japan, now publishes these lists, and 
although some of the printed matter is scarcely likely 
to be intelligible to the majority of English readers, 
the titles of many papers are at any rate printed in the 
language of publication, and the references are to 
recent work. 
” 
In his ‘‘ Notes on Some Focometric Apparatus”’ in 
the December, 1914, number of the Journal of the 
Royal Microscopical Society, Mr. F. J. Cheshire states 
that he has found the following modification of 
Blakesley’s arrangement for determining the focal 
length of a short-focus system by the method of mag- 
nification, most convenient for the ordinary require- 
ments of the microscopist. An achromatic system of 
focal length 2-6 cm. is mounted in the middle of a 
tube having a millimetre scale at its lower and a slit 
° 
