2 [6 



NA TURE 



IJnly 8, i88o 



An interesting account of the Caribs of Dominica fol- 

 lows. They have allotted to them a reservation extendinn- 

 from Mahoe River to Crayfish River, a distance of about 

 three miles along the Atlantic coast and away back into 

 the mountains as far as they please to cultivate. Though 

 each family has a little garden near the house, all the 

 "provision grounds," where staple articles of food are 

 grown — yams, sweet potatoes, cassava, bananas, and taro 

 — are at a distance from the houses, some even two miles 

 away— solitary openings made in the depths of the high 

 woods. The Caribs are especially interesting as being 

 the earliest American savages met with by Columbus, the 

 original " cannibals," and the race to which Caliban and 

 Man Friday belonged. They seem somewhat addicted 

 to drinking now, for the author describes the old King 

 George the Third as seen tottering towards the plantation 

 with a sovereign he had earned in his hand to spend it in 

 rum. A lot of drunken Caribs tried to break into the author's 

 house one night for amusement, and not being able to do 

 that, poked a lot of fireflies in at the cracks to light up the 

 inside, and see for certain whether he was at home — a 

 \-ery neat way of lighting up an interior. The general 

 account of the Caribs is well worth reading. 



We cannot follow the author in his exciting hunt after 

 the souffriere bird, which lives only about the crater of 

 the island of St. Vincent. The wary bird when at last 

 procured proved to be of a new species, Myadestcs 

 stbilans. In Antigua he was victimised by the well- 

 known "jigger." " I awoke one morning with an itching 

 of my toes, w'hich frequent rubbing failed to allay, and 

 examination revealed four white tumours. They were as 

 large as peas, and in the centre of each was a little black 

 speck. I called my boy William, who at once pronounced 

 them jiggers." The first old negress passing was called 

 in, and turned them out of their nests with an adroitness 

 which showed long practice. " A few hours are sufficient 

 to give the jigger a hiding-place, and as the sensation he 

 causes is a rather pleasant itching only for a time, he is 

 sometimes not discovered till a painful sore is formed." 



At Dominica the author met with Dr. Miroy, a friend 

 and correspondent of Sir Joseph Hooker, and who is 

 endeavouring, through the aid of the Kew establishment, 

 to re-introduce the cultivation of coffee into the island. 

 He is cultivating Liberian coffee, in the hope that it will 

 prove able to withstand the attacks of blight which ruined 

 the former crops forty years ago. 



In Grenada the author hunted the monkeys which 

 abound there as at St. Kitts, having been of course intro- 

 duced, and having run w^ild, as explained in a series of 

 letters in N.\ture some months ago. He could not, 

 however, make up his mind to shoot one when it came to 

 the point. The monkeys are a great pest, and do great 

 damage to the cultivator, just as in St. lago. Cape Verde 

 Islands, on the other side of the Atlantic, where also they 

 were doubtless introduced, though it is not as yet known 

 what the species is. 



The book ends with an account of an ascent of the 

 Guadeloupe Souffri&re. It is throughout entertaining and 

 highly amusing, but the author is evidently not very deeply 

 versed in natural history, and there is often to be noted a 

 lack of precise information, as in the case, for example, 

 of the crayfish, cited above. The account of the land- 

 crabs is somewhat conflicting. At one place we read of a 



mother-crab, with loo tiny young, found far up in the 

 mountains, at another, where the author falls in with an 

 army of land-crabs on their combined march to the sea; 

 he tells us that they bury their eggs under the sand, 

 where they are hatched, and soon after millions of the 

 new-born crabs are seen quitting the shore and slowly 

 travelling up the mountains. 



The story which he tells of the habits of the huge 

 Hercules beetle, Dynastcs hcrcicles, can hardly be accepted 

 as it is by the author on the authority of his dusky guide. 

 It is that the male beetle seizes a small branch of a tree 

 between its enormously long nippers and buzzes round 

 and round the branch till this is cat off, producing a knife- 

 grinding sound, supposed by the author to be a sexual 

 call. He heard a knife-grinding noise indeed, but he did 

 not see the rotating beetle. We recommend the book to 

 all our readers. 



.■; NEW ENGLISH TEXT-BOOK OF BOTANY 

 All Ekmaitaiy Text-book of Botany. Translated from 



the German of Prof. K. Prantl. Revised by S. H. 



Vines, M.A., D.Sc, F.L S. (London : Sonnenschein 



and Allen, iSSo.) 



THIS text-book, we are informed in the English pre- 

 face, "was written by Prof Prantl, to meet a 

 growing demand for a work on botany, which, while less 

 voluminous than the well-known work of Sachs, should 

 resemble it in its mode of treatment of the subject, and 

 serve as an introduction to it." V>'hile we already have 

 in English many text-books for students, one indeed 

 almost professedly taking the same line as this, every 

 teacher must have felt how inadequately they supply the 

 needs of the class for which they have been written. 

 Ivlost are new editions of books written first twenty years 

 ago or more, and suffer from the impossibility of intro. 

 ducing those new facts which have so deeply modified our 

 present standpoint, without damaging the symmetry and 

 unity of a well-written work ; and others, of more recent 

 origin, are badly compiled or over-concentrated. The 

 book before us, avoiding these faults, will unquestionably 

 take a high place at once ; for though using Sachs as his 

 storehouse, the author has digested the strong meat of the 

 big book, and here provides his readers with the milk 

 suited to their years. Moreover, the book is singularly 

 well-balanced in all its parts, and clearly-written through- 

 out. The translation is so flowing that no reader unin- 

 formed of the fact would guess that German was the 

 original dress ; and Mr. Vines has added to the value 

 of the w'ork by appending a table, in which the classifica- 

 tion there adopted is compared with that of Bentham and 

 Hooker. 



A reference to those knotty points to which one always 

 looks at once as tests of successful treatment has proved 

 so satisfactory that it is with regret that we turn to the 

 ungracious task of pointing out the deficiencies that will 

 somehow creep into the most carefully-written books. In 

 several points Prantl has followed Sachs too closely, so 

 that the accounts of cell-division, of the morphology of the 

 pollen-grain and ovule, of the growing-point of Phanero- 

 gams, are all far behind our present knowledge. Again, 

 in the treatment of "Modes of Branching," Sachs has 

 been followed rather than Hofmeister, who, despite his 

 complex sentences, gives a much clearer exposition. 



