270 
NATURE 
[May 6, 1915 

before he went to the front, of an important post at 
home in connection with munitions of war would 
move him from his desire to give his personal ser- 
vices at the front with the scouts to whom he had 
become so attached. He was a man of very lovable 
disposition and unusual ability. He was born on 
December 7, 1881, and was educated at Marlborough 
and Trinity College, Cambridge. He took the 
Mathematical Tripos in his second year, 1903, and 
afterwards passed out in the Mechanical Sciences 
Tripos in 1905. For some time after taking his de- 
gree he worked at Messrs. Mather and Platt’s at 
Manchester. For a time, too, he carried out impor- 
tant work in the test-room of the Cambridge Scientific 
Instrument Company, and by his exceptional business 
ability and foresight he rendered highly valued ser- 
vice as a director of the company. About seven years 
ago he went to Messrs. Bolckow Vaughan’s at 
Middlesbrough, and his sound practical judgment 
and administrative ability soon won for him a very 
important position in the firm. In this war the 
country has to mourn the loss of many valuable 
lives, and Erasmus Darwin was one of those whose 
fine, modest conscientiousness and unswerving 
strength and loyalty made us know that we lose a 
man whom we should have been proud to see taking 
his part in the guiding of public affairs in the country. 
Tue director of the Meteorological Office, Dr. 
W. N. Shaw, has sent us a copy of a new scale of 
velocity equivalents of the numbers of the Beaufort 
scale of wind force which he has received from Prince 
Boris Galitzin, the director of the Russian Meteoro- 
logical Service. The table has been drawn up at the 
Observatoire Physique Central Nicolas, and expresses 
the wind force determined by the Wild wind-gauge 
in terms of the Beaufort scale. These values will be 
used by Russian Meteorological stations as from May 
1. The table has been compiled in accordance with 
the decisions of the International Meteorological Com- 
mittee, at the meeting held at Rome in 1913. 
Beaufort Velocity in Beaufort Velocity in 
scale metres per second — scale metres per second 
to) ab o 7 abe 14-17 
I I (oo ts 56 18-20 
2 253) 9 21-24 
3 AF eeaetO) Bis 25-28 
4 (Satay at b0 29-33 
5 g-10 12 = 34 and more. 
6 iii) 
Tur Smithsonian Institution announces that fossil 
bacteria have been discovered in very ancient lime- 
stones collected in Gallatin County, Montana, by Dr. 
C. D. Walcott, secretary of the institution. For some 
time Dr. Walcott has believed that these bacteria 
existed, and mention of the fact was made before the 
Botanical Society of Washington on April 6, when 
attention was directed to their existence in associa- 
tion with fossil algal deposits of the Newland lime- 
stone. The belief that bacteria were the most impor- 
tant factor in the deposition of these ancient lime- 
stones was also mentioned by Dr. Walcott in a pre- 
liminary publication of the Smithsonian Institution. 
At that time, however, no definite bacteria had been 
discovered, but in thin sections of limestone from the 
NO; 2375, VOL. 95] 


collections made in 1914 the microscope now shows 
these very minute forms of life, some twenty to thirty 
million of years old. The bacteria were discovered 
in three sections cut from an algal form included 
| under the generic name Gallatinia, named after the 
great American explorer Gallatin. The bacteria con- 
sist of individual cells and apparent chains of cells 
which correspond in their physical appearance with 
the cells of Micrococci. 
Tue Art Museum of Boston has recently acquired 
one of the gems of Minoan art, which is described by 
Prof. E. Gardner in part ii. of Ancient Egypt for 1915. 
It is an ivory statuette with gold ornaments and 
details, 64 in. in height. The resemblance of the 
figure to that of the famous Snake Goddess found by 
Sir A. Evans at Knossos is obvious. But it resembles 
not so much any art of ancient Greece as that of 
Gothic work of the thirteenth century. At the same 
time, the character of the materials seems to preclude 
the possibility of forgery. She wears a dress of 
Cretan type, and her head is adorned with a splendid 
crown, on which a gold ornament was probably fixed. 
The statuette exhibits for the first time a treatment 
of the human figure which is comparable with the 
fine studies of animals characteristic of Cretan or 
Mycenzean art. It may be placed not far from the 
high-water mark of Cretan pottery, and it may go 
back to the Middle Minoan age. This new discovery 
emphasises more than ever the contrast between the 
art of Crete and that of ancient Hellas. It is much 
to be regretted that this fine work of art has not found 
its home in our national collections. : 
Mr. T. Eric Peer has issued in the Publications of 
the Manchester Museum, No. 75, an account of the 
Stela of Sebek-khu, which contains the earliest record 
of an Egyptian campaign in Asia, one of the most 
important documents ever found in Egypt. It was 
unearthed at Abydos in 1901 by Prof. Garstang, and 
is now in the Manchester Museum. It measures 
163 by 10 in., and the inscriptions and representations 
are somewhat carelessly incised. Its importance lies 
in the fact that this is a record of an early campaign 
in a period hitherto unknown preceding the age from 
which date the Hyksos invasion, the great wars of 
Thotmes III. and Rameses II., down to the cam- 
paign of Sheshonk, mentioned in the Old Testament. 
It represents the beginning of reprisals in the Asiatic 
field at the beginning of the twelfth dynasty. The 
people now attacked by Egypt were the Mentu of 
Sebet, or nearer Asia, and the Mentu were an Asiatic 
tribe living close to the Egyptian frontier. On this 
occasion the Mentu were aided by their allies, the 
Retenu, probably inhabiting the Peninsula of Sinai. 
Sekmem, the place attacked, was somewhere in 
Palestine. However the details of the campaign may 
be worked out, this Stela remains our best authority 
for Egyptian conquest in Asia prior to the eighteenth 
dynasty. 
AccorpinG to the Victorian Naturalist for March, 
examples of parasitic Copepods belonging to the family 
Monstrillidae, have been discovered for the first time 
in Australia by Mr. J. Searle, but as yet their specific 

