144 
NATURE 
[Apri 8, 1915 


strike but must also grip, so as to drive its poison- 
fangs home and wring out its glands. And with 
regard to the treatment of snake-bite, he has 
failed to impress sufficiently upon his readers the 
important facts (a) that the most efficient liga- 
tures and the most powerful local antidotes are 
perfectly useless if applied after a lethal dose of 
venom has been absorbed—the available interval, 
according to the ample and carefully controlled 
experiments of Captains H. W. Acton and R. 
Knowles, being from ten to twenty minutes; and 
(b) that after the venom has been absorbed in 
lethal quantity the only hopeful remedy is a suit- 
able anti-venom. 
Good and useful as this book is, it is to be re- 
gretted that, like so many modern things, it recks 
so little of the priceless past. Without going back 
to Herodotus and his entertaining account of the 
crocodile, the author might have said something 
about the great pioneers of herpetology. 
(2) This is a book that, notwithstanding the 
limitations of its title, is of much more than local 
service. Its contents are disposed in three pro- 
gressive stages, the finst dealing with insects 
generally from a biological viewpoint, the second 
treating more particularly of insects in their 
economic range, while the third is at once an 
exact survey and an illustrated epitome of the 
specific local forms that affect man and his works 
for good and ill, but chiefly for ill. 
As is natural in a work sponsored by a director 
of agriculture and a board of revenue, the main 
end is economic—namely, to place on record what 
is known about the insect pests of agriculture in 
southern India, to facilitate their identification, 
and to explain approved methods of limiting their 
ravages. Order by order, and family by family, 
the specific pests are marshalled and individually 
figured on a lavish scale, referred to their local 
habitation, characterised in their life-history and 
economic rdéle, and relegated to the code of 
criminal procedure. Beyond this certain forms 
concerned in the transmission of disease are 
treated in a practical manner, and many insects 
of approved utility or potential service to man are 
individually noticed and portrayed. 
The earlier pages that deal with insects as a 
class in their broad economic incidence are also 
well done. Among other things they include good 
chapters on pests as a whole, the general causes 
that favour their increase, the various means by 
which they may spread, and the methods adopted 
for their control. These last, both direct and in- 
direct, are discussed with insight and discrimina- 
tion, and insecticides of divers kinds, and all the 
ingenious apparatus of their application, are fully 
NO. 2371, VOL. 95] 

Polonnaruva, 
| Buddhist 
described and criticised; while at the same time 
the author is careful to emphasise the rational 
factor underlying all remedial treatment—namely, 
exact knowledge not only of the life-history of 
the particular pest, but also of all the local con- 
ditions, natural and otherwise, of its particular 
occurrence. The series of chapters on economic 
insects brigaded according to réle or circuit—e.g. 
as caterpillar pests, beneficial insects, pests of 
stores, and so on—are also extremely useful, such 
collective unities being easy to follow and to 
tackle. 
The preliminary chapters on insect biology, 
though rather promiscuous and sketchy, are good 
in intention and are suggestive. In the chapter 
on ‘“‘tropisms,” however, the author gives his 
reader no hint that the subject-matter of his defini- 
tions and classification lies on the very boundary- 
line of legitimate inference and beyond the bounds 
of exact knowledge, and that these ‘“‘tropisms” 
are mere imposing words which not only do not 
explain any process of nature, but are not even 
generalised expressions of the results of any 
analysis of natural processes. 
The price of the volume, with its fifty beautiful 
coloured plates and many hundreds of illustrations 
in the text, is absurdly low, but its weight (5 lb. 
6 oz.) is prodigious. 
OUR BOOKSHELF. 
Memoirs of the Colombo Museum. 

Series A., 
No. 1. Bronses from Ceylon, Chiefly in the 
Colombo Museum. By Dr. A. K. Coomara- 
swamy. Pp. 31+xxvill plates. (Ceylon: 
Colombo Museum, 1914.) n.p. 
Tus is the first issue of a series of monographs 
intended to describe the art treasures of the 
Colombo Museum, among which the bronzes are 
of special importance. Some of the finest examples 
have been published in Mr. Vincent Smith’s 
“ History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon,” but 
a more complete description of these beautiful 
objects is welcome. Dr. A. K. Coomaraswamy has 
contributed a useful introduction. It is not easy 
to fix the exact date of the bronzes, but they seem 
to cover the period beween the ninth and fourteenth 
centuries, A.D. They fall into two groups: 
and Saiva Hindu. The discovery in 
Ceylon of many images of Bodhasattvas and 
female Mahayana deities is important because it 
proves that the latter cult existed in the island, 
and that it is now more than ever inaccurate to 
speak of Northern and Southern Buddhism as if 
these geographical terms connoted a distinction 
between the Hinayana and Mahayana schools. In 
this connection the images of Brahmanical deities 
absorbed into Buddhism are of special value. 
’ The Saiva Hindu bronzes, like those from 
differ widely from the Buddhist 
