I lO 



NATURE 



[September 26, 1912 



honoured by the presence of the Raj Rana of 

 Jhalawar, and was supported by Sir Norman 

 Lockyer, Sir Charles Watson, Sir George (iibb, 

 the Deputy-Master of Trinity House, the President 

 of the Royal Meteorological Society, Captain 

 Loriui^, R.N., Captain Sueter, R.N., Captain 

 Clarke, Captain Thomson, C.B. , Captain Lyons, 

 R.E., Captain Henrici, R.E., and other representa- 

 tives of various public offices. 



The Raj Rana entertained the members of the 

 Commission at dinner at Bailey's Hotel on Friday, 

 September 20. Some of the delegates remaining 

 in England were entertained for the week-end by 

 Mr. and Mrs. Cave at Ditcham Park, Petersfield. 



The reports of the proceedings at the meetings, 

 which were read and signed at the final meetings 

 on Friday, September 20, will now be printed and 

 circulated to the various meteorological institutes 

 for comments. These will be taken into con- 

 sideration at the next meeting of the International 

 Meteorological Committee, which, it is hoped, may 

 be held in Rome in the week after Easter Week 

 in the year 191 3. The meeting will have to con- 

 sider not only the reports of the Commissions 

 which have already met, but also the important 

 qui'stion of the application of meteorology to agri- 

 culture, which has been raised by a letter addressed 

 to the president of the International Meteoro- 

 logical Committee by the president of the Inter- 

 national Institute for Agriculture, which has its 

 seat at Rome. 



liesides the Commissions, the proceedings of 

 which have been referred to here, it may be noted 

 that the Commission for Radiation, under the 

 presidency of Prof. J. Maurer, of Zurich, met in 

 -Switzerland in the first week of September; and, 

 earlier in the year — May 27 to June i — a largely 

 attended meeting of the Commission for Scientific 

 Aeronautics was held at Vienna, under the presi- 

 dency of Prof. Hergesell. The Commission passed 

 a number of resolutions, one of which, in favour 

 of the establishment of a network of stations for 

 dail)- observations with pilot balloons, has already 

 been communicated to various Governments 

 through diplomatic channels. 



Perhaps the most noteworthy of the resolutions 

 wf-re those passed on the initiative of Prof. 

 Bjerknes, formerly of Christiana, and now of 

 Leipzig, proposing that the results of upper air 

 observations shall be arranged according to 

 definite steps of pressure instead of steps of 

 height ; that the heights shall be given in 

 " dynamic " meters — that is, a step corresponding 

 to a certain difference of gravity potential, not of 

 geometrical height ; and, thirdly, that pressures 

 shall be recorded in millibars (C.G.S. units) 

 instead of millimetres or inches. These important 

 steps in the direction of arranging the material 

 obtained from the investigation of the upper air 

 in a form suitable for dynamical calculation are 

 to come into effect with January, 1913, but the 

 resolution as to pressure units is to be subject to 

 the approval of the International Meteorological 

 Committee. The forthcoming meeting proposed 

 for Rome is therefore likely to be one of great 

 importance. 



NO. 2239, VOL. 90] 



SCIENTIFIC COLLECTIONS OF THE 



GERMAN CENTRAL AFRICA EXPEDITION 



OF 1907-1908.1 



T N 1902 the Uuke .-\dolf Friedrich visited East 

 J- Africa. In 1904 he returned there and ex- 

 plored the region immediately to the south-east of 

 Lake Victoria Nyanza. In 1907 he started again,, 

 this time at the head of a well-equipped scitntific 

 expedition charged with the special task of exam- 

 ining the volcanic regions west of the Victoria 

 Nyanza and north of Tanganyika. The general 

 results of this 1907-8 expedition have already 

 been published, both in German and in English, 

 the English version having been brought out by 

 Cassell and Co. in 191 o. The Duke, after leading 

 his expedition through the countries of Karagwe, 

 Ruanda (including the Kivu district), and the 

 Virunga volcanoes, travelled past Lake Edward 

 Nyanza to the Semliki, the Albert Nyanza, the 

 gold-mines of Kilo, and then westwards through 

 the Ituri Forest and down the Aruwimi to the 

 main Congo, and so back to Germany by the 

 Atlantic Ocean. 



The volume before us is the third issued as the 

 result of a careful examination of the immense 

 collections made by this scientific expedition. The 

 two previous volumes have dealt with the topo- 

 graphy, geology, and meteorology, and with 

 botany. Vol. iii. gives us, first, a remarkably 

 interesting dissertation on the earth-worms or 

 Oligochasta ; on the Serphidse, Cynipidae, Chal- 

 cididae, Evaniidje, and Stephanidae of hymenop- 

 terous insects ; on the decapod crustaceans (the 

 land-crabs, shrimps, prawns, &-c.) of equatorial 

 Africa; on the bees, the Cladocera, the molluscs 

 (especially land-snails), the bivalves, the burrowing 

 Hymenoptera, and wasps; the birds of the Cen- 

 tral African lake region ; the ants ; the Braconidae 

 and beetles ; the copepods of the East African 

 lake region ; the cockroaches and butterflies of 

 Ruwenzori and the Congo Forest. The separate 

 articles have evidently been inserted in the order 

 in which they were written, and have thus been 

 cited here. It would have been more convenient 

 to the zoologist, however, if they had beerr 

 arranged systematically, so that one passed on, 

 for example, from bees and wasps to ants, or 

 from one group of crustaceans to another, with- 

 out some intervening description of a totally dif- 

 ferent group of animals. 



Probably the most valuable part of the present 

 compilation will be that on the earth-worms and 

 the birds. Earth-worms — it has long been 

 realised, even by those who do not specialise in 

 any way in that study — are amongst the most 

 interesting and certain means of estimating the 

 relationship between the existing distribution of 

 land and water on the earth's surface and that of 

 past times. The article on the Oligochseta col- 

 lected by the Adolf-Friedrich Scientific Expedition 

 is accompanied by a well-written summary of the 



I " Wissenschaflliche Ereebnisse der Ututschen Zentral-.lfrika-Expedi- 

 tion, igoy-B," unter Fiihrune Adolf Friedrichs, Herzoc^ 2u Mecklenburg. 

 Band iii., Zoolotrie i., herauseeselicn von Dr. H. Schuliotz. Pp xxiii-(- 

 560+plates xi-xiv. (Leipzig: Klinkhart and Biermann, iqi2.) Price 24. 



