August 14, 19 13] 



NATURE 



615 



sixty-three minutes — a record at the time. Cody was 

 born in 1862, and was in his forty-seventh year when 

 he began his experiments with flying machines. At 

 the time of his death he was building a triplane on 

 which he proposed to try to cross the Atlantic. 



To the large collection of the contents of "short 

 stone cists " found in the north-east of Scotland, and 

 displayed in the anatomy museum of the University 

 of Aberdeen, there have been added recently the con- 

 tents of two others. One was found at Ellon, Aber- 

 deenshire, and the other at Burgie, Morayshire. Both 

 cists lay in elevated gravelly situations, with no ex- 

 ternal marks or monuments to indicate their positions, 

 and had their long axes directed from east to west. 

 Their roofs and walls were composed of la:. ' 

 stones indigenous to the parts of the country in which 

 they were found, and their floors of a layer of sand 

 in which pebbles were embedded. The Ellon cist 

 measured (inside) 3 ft. 4 in. by 2 ft. 1 in. by 17 in. 

 deep, the Burgie cist 3 ft. by 1 ft. 10 in. by 2 ft. deep. 

 The former cist contained a fully formed male human 

 skeleton, showing characters ordinarily met with in 

 skeletons found in short cists, viz., stature about 5 ft. 

 5 in., round skull, short broad face, narrow orbits, and 

 rather wide nose. To its right lay the much-decayed 

 remains of the skeleton of a person from fifteen to 

 twenty years of age. In the cist at Burgie were found 

 remains of a fully formed human skeleton, much de- 

 composed, the skull of which had been so injured after 

 the cist had been found that no observations could be 

 made from it. In both cists the skeletons had been 

 buried in a crouching position. An urn of the "drink- 

 ing-cup " variety and a flint scraper were found in 

 the Ellon cist, but nothing beyond skeletal remains 

 in the Burgie one. 



The special feature of the present summer is the 

 general dullness of the weather, with which is also 

 necessarily associated a persistent low day tempera- 

 ture. Greenwich this year has the least sunny July on 

 record since the registration of sunshine has been 

 established, and although since August opened the 

 weather has been somewhat brighter, still, many days 

 have been very dull. Only one day at Greenwich has 

 had the mean daily temperature in excess of the 

 average from July 1 to August 11, a period of six 

 weeks, and the highest maximum temperature ob- 

 served is 76 , on July 12. Xot withstanding the cloudy 

 character of the summer, there has been remarkably 

 little rain, and prior to August 9 a drought had 

 occurred in many parts of the British Isles. At 

 Greenwich no rain fell from July 22 to August 6, a 

 period of sixteen days ; at Bath there was no rain for 

 seventeen days, and at Nottingham for eighteen davs. 

 For the first sixty-eight days of summer from June 1 

 to August 7 the aggregate rainfall at Kew is 47 per 

 cent, of the average, and at Greenwich 61 per cent. 

 For the corresponding period in other parts of England 

 Bath had only 20 per cent, of the average, Jersey 

 27 per cent., Nottingham 33 per cent., Liverpool 65 

 per cent., and Dover 68 per cent. In Scotland Leith 

 had only 32 per cent, of the average rain and Wick 

 59 per cent., whilst in Ireland Valencia had 57 per 

 cent., and Birr Castle 68 per cent. Rain has now 

 NO. 2285, VOL. 91] 



fallen in many parts of the British Kirs, but in places 

 the conditions continue dry. 



Mr. C. Robinson, writing from Lancaster, says 

 that while walking along a grassy path near some 

 trees on a dark night he saw, "gleaming out of the 

 darkness at my feet, what might have been a piece 

 of frosted silver reflecting moonlight." Upon picking 

 up the object he found it was a piece of decayed wood, 

 which he took away with him, but was disappointed 

 to find afterwards that the wood had lost its 

 luminosity. The phosphorescence of decaying wood is 

 not an unusual phenomenon, and is frequently due to 

 the mycelium of a fungus which permeates the wood 

 of old tree-trunks, and has the property of emitting 

 light under the same conditions as those of respiration. 

 When the wood is taken away from its natural sur- 

 roundings, the luminosity disappears because the rela- 

 tions and conditions of life of the fungus are not the 

 same as before. 



In his lecture on the pygmies of New Guinea re- 

 cently delivered at the Royal Institution, Capt. C. G. 

 Raw ling gave a full account of the expedition 

 organised by the Ornithologists' Union, assisted by 

 the Roval Geographical Society, which left England 

 in 1909 to explore the south-west coast of Dutch New- 

 Guinea. He sums up the results as follows : — Large 

 and valuable collections of birds, mammals, reptiles, 

 butterflies, and moths, with botanical and ethno- 

 graphical specimens, have been made ; a new and 

 hitherto unknown race of pygmies was discovered, 

 studied, measured, and photographed ; a range of 

 mountains, containing the greatest precipice in the 

 world, together with 3000 miles of country, have been 

 surveyed and mapped ; new snow mountains and great 

 rivers were found and explored ; a long stretch of 

 coast-line was surveyed. This, the longest cross- 

 countrv journey ever undertaken in Dutch New 

 Guinea, has proved the impossibility of the Mimika 

 River as a line of advance to the snows, and, on the 

 other hand, the value of the great rivers to the east, 

 if an expedition in the same direction is again contem- 

 plated. 



Certain' human bones discovered in 191 1 by Mr. 

 Hiram Bingham in gravel near Cuzco, Peru, have 

 been considered to indicate the existence of man in 

 that country between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. In 

 an article in the July number of The American Journal 

 of Science. Mr. G. F. Eaton, who has visited the spot, 

 states that the associated remains are essentially of 

 a modern type, including, as they do, bones of domes- 

 ticated cattle. He therefore concludes that the bones 

 were buried some time "during the three centuries and 

 a half that have elapsed since the Spaniards brought 

 domestic cattle to Peru." In a second article in the 

 same issue, Mr. H. E. Gregory states that although 

 his investigations on the spot do not definitely dis- 

 prove the theory of the great age of the bones, yet 

 " the geologic data do not require more than a few 

 hundreds of years as the age of the human remains 

 found in the Cuzco gravels." 



1 1 we may judge from a report on their breeding in 

 that State, published in the Bulletin of the Illinois 



