February 17, 1910] 



NA TURE 



4S: 



After having found such "beds," the travellers came 

 across a family of bears, which had their lair at 

 the foot of a tree, hidden by dense foliage. 

 When dislodged, some of them climbed about 

 rapidly. 



The beautiful Morpho butterflies were abundant at 

 places, and not at all shy. On the contrary, they 

 alighted upon the table and sucked from the dishes 

 during breakfast. At Cuenca Dr. Festa was treated 

 to the spectacle of a fierce battle, which lasted all 

 day long, and on the following day the victor entered 

 the town after a loss of goo dead. A rather full and 

 interesting account is given of the livaros tribe of 

 Indians, who, not yet appreciating the value of 

 money, required knives, guns, needle and thread, &c., 

 for barter. The wilder they were, the better they 

 were as collectors. T^ieir special weapon is the blow- 

 pipe. .\ favourite ornament of both sexes, besides 

 painting themselves, is a wooden lip-plug, one inch 

 long and half an inch thick, with pendants of needles, 

 the brightly-coloured wings of beetles, &c. The house 

 is large, of the type of the communal house, the sexes 

 occupying different quarters of the same large room, 

 and to each woman's bed are tied several fierce watch- 

 dogs. 



In the mountains of the province of Carchi were 

 procured a considerable number of antique specimens 

 of pottery and some crania. 



Unfortunately, this book is written mostly in the 

 style of a diar}', which does not well lend itself to 

 generalisations, but rather to matter-of-fact records 

 of animals and plants observed; It would have been 

 interesting to read how the Ecuadorean civilisation 

 appeared to an Italian, a cultured representative of 

 another Latin race. The English-speaking civilisa- 

 tion is too divergent from the Latin-American in 

 almost every walk of life really to understand it and 

 to appreciate its many good points. However, the 

 author is modest, and enlivens his account of the 

 many things he has done and seen with but little 

 humour. 



The book, printed in excellent type and on verv 

 good paper, and adorned with some seventy or eightv, 

 mostly full-paged, beautifully reproduced photographs, 

 seems wonderfully cheap for the price of Ss. 



AVSTRAUAN ANIMALS. 

 The Animals of Australia. Mammals, Reptiles, and 

 Amphibians. By A. H. S. Lucas and W. H. Dudley 

 le .Scuef. Pp. xi + 327. (Melbourne : Whitcombe and 

 Tombs, Ltd., 1909.) Price 15J1. net. 



MESSRS. LUCAS AND LE SOUEF have given 

 us a book which ought to find a very hearty wel- 

 come, especially amongst .Australian naturalists. Whilst 

 intended primarily for the general reader, the arrange- 

 ment and treatment are throughout thoroughly 

 scientific, and the illustrations, many of which are 

 from original photographs, are, on the whole, very 

 good. The full-page photograph of a wheelbarrow on 

 p. 179 is perhaps a little superfluous, however. It is 

 true that the wheelbarrow contains a snake, "jut it is 

 NO. 2103, VOL. 82] 



a very small one, and a much better photograph of 

 the same snake is given on another page. 



The information that the number of Australian 

 species of Eutheria is the same as that of the mar- 

 supials (106) comes rather as a surprise, even if, as 

 we suppose, it includes introduced species. 



The authors have a melancholy tale to tell of the 

 rate at which the marsupials are being exterminated 

 for the sake of their skins. It appears that no fewer 

 than 873,837 "opossum" skins were offered for sale 

 in the Sydney market alone during the year 1908, and 

 other species in hardly less alarming numbers. 



The section dealing with the snakes is one of the 

 n-.ost interesting. Death from snake-bite appears to 

 b-i rare in Australia, although many of the species are 

 poisonous, and some of them deadly. In case of 

 snake-bite, however, most people prefer to err on the 

 safe side, though there are probably not many who 

 have so much to show for their mistake as the man 

 who exhibits to his friends a bottle containing one of 

 his own fingers and a perfectly harmless snake by 

 which it had been bitten ! Snake-stories form an im- 

 portant part of the literature of the Australian bush, 

 but we do not recollect having heard before about the 

 tiger-snake which was found enjoying a sun-bath 

 balanced on the topmost wire of a fence, with the 

 folds of the body nicely adjusted on each side to main- 

 tain the balance. W'e are told that the Australian 

 snakes do not charm or fascinate their prey in any 

 way (p. 156). If this is so, we are at a loss to under- 

 stand the photograph on p. 181, which, at first sight, 

 at any rate, looks like a snake fascinating a hen ; 

 perhaps, however, the hen is refusing to be fas- 

 cinated. 



One difficulty which has to be overcome by the 

 writer of a popular book on natural history in a 

 " new " country is the absence of a popular termin- 

 ology. To some extent Messrs. Lucas and le 

 Souef have endeavoured to supply this deficiency ; 

 notablv in the case of the Agamid lizards, for which 

 they suggest the name "Dragons." Thus Amphi- 

 bolurus macidatus is to be known as the " Military 

 Dragon," presumably on account of its brilliant 

 colours; but we should hardly have thought that 

 "Queen Adelaide's Dragon" was an appropriate ren- 

 dering of Ampltibolurus adelaidensis, the termination 

 of the specific name suggesting a geographical rather 

 than a personal reference. In a few cases the Austra- 

 lian public has already taken the matter of nomen- 

 clature into its own hands, as in the well-known case 

 of "Goana," which is, of course, a corruption of 

 " Iguana," a name popularly but erroneously applied 

 to the "lace monitor" {Varantis varius). 



.Mthough the book does not profess to deal with 

 the fishes, the authors have not been able to resist the 

 temptation to include an account of Ceratodus, evi- 

 dently on the ground that it is "part fish, part amphi- 

 bian." The amphibian part seems hardly sufficient to 

 justify its inclusion, but we must admit that the 

 temptation was very strong. 



The book is well got up, though the paper is un- 

 pleasantly glossy. We can strongly recommend it to 

 all who are interested in .Australian natural history. 



