August 17, 1905] 



NA TURE 



385 



of high baroTiictric prpssure, an area of low pressure lay 

 over Italy and the Adriatic; these conditions caused an 

 unusually heavy fall of rain over the whole of Switzer- 

 land during the night (jif August 11-12, exceeding 2 inches 

 in amount at several places, with early snowfall at the 

 high-level stations. 



In a recent issue (August 5) the Aaiicmy directs atten- 

 tion to a curious poetical tribute — composed by a French 

 mathematician — to Archimedes, referring to the evaluation 

 of TT, which, set out in thirty places of decimals, is 

 3- 1415926535897(53238462643383279. It will be observed 

 that each of the thirty-one words in this quatrain contains 

 the number of letters corresponding with the successive 

 numbers in the numerical expression : — 



31415 9 26 5 35 



Que j'aime h faire apprendre un nombre utile aux sages 



8 7 9 



Immortel .Archim^de, artiste ing^nieur ! 



323 8 4 626 



Qui de ton jugement pent priser la valeur? 



433 8 327 9 



Pour nioi ton probl^me eut de pareils avantages. 



The Frankfurter Zcitung reproduces the French verse, and 

 adds a similar effort emanating from a German poet and 

 geometrician : — 



1 I 4 I 5 9 26 5 



Dir, o Held, o alter Philosoph, Du Riesen-Genie ! 



358 9 7 



Wie viele Tausende bewundern Geister, 



9 323 8 



himmlisch wie Du und gottlich ! — 



4 626 



Noch reiner in Aeonen 



327 9 



wie im lichten Morgenrot ! 



The .l(-(i</ci»y asks for English parallels to these efforts. 



The fifth instalment of the " Fauna of New England " 

 has just been issued in the seventh volume of Occasional 

 Papers of the Boston {VS. A.) Society of Natural History, 

 rmd comprises a list of the Crustacea, by Miss M. J. 

 Rathbun. The number of species recorded is 390. 



We have received a copy of the sixth annual report of 

 the Plymouth Municipal Museum and Art Gallery, in 

 which are recorded the additions made to the collections 

 during the past year, which are numerous. As regards the 

 biological and geological sections, the committee is 

 apparently of opinion that a miscellaneous omnium 

 gatherum is preferable to a representative local collection 

 — an opinion not shared by ourselves. In looking over 

 the list of additions to the geological series, we were 

 somewhat surprised to find the entry of a cast as 

 Archaeopteryx sinensis, which is, however, evidently a 

 misprint for A. sieniensi. We idso notice molybdinite in 

 place of molybdenite. 



The latest issue (vol. xv., part ii.) of thv I'mcredings 

 of the Cotleswold Naturalists' Field Club contains two 

 papers dealing with local subjects, namely, one by Mr. 

 L. Richardson on the effects of earth-pressure on the 

 Keuper rocks in the neighbourhood of Eldersfield, and 

 a second, by Mr. C. Upton, on some Cotteswold Oolitic 

 brachiopods. In the latter communication the author, 

 after alluding to the extreme difficulty of determining the 

 various forms of Rhynchonella, feels him.self justified in 

 describing two species of that genus as new, and likewise 



NO. 1868, VOL. 72] 



two now terebratulas. Other papers deal with rock speci- 

 mens from Cyprus, experiences in Korea, and certain early 

 Indian stone monuinents. 



The third part of vol. xxv. of Notes from the Leyden 

 .UiiiciiDi, issued on April 15, comprises eleven short 

 articles dealing with various invertebrate groups, among 

 which one on Trochida? by Mr. M. M. Schepman, and a 

 second on the collection of chitons in the Leyden Museum 

 by Dr. H. F. Nierstrasz, are illustrated. Among the 

 other contents reference may be made to five by Mr. 

 C. Ritsema on various groups of beetles, and a sixth by 

 Mr. E. Jacobson (communicated by the Rev. E. Wasmann) 

 on the Javan ant Polyrhachis dives. It is well known 

 that the oriental ant (Ecophylla smaragdina has the 

 remarkable habit of employing its larviE (which have 

 special silk-glands for making their own cocoons) to glue 

 together the edges of leaves for the benefit of the ants 

 themselves, and the Javan species uses its larvae in the 

 same manner to spin nests. 



In the Records of the .Australian Museum (vol. vi., 

 part i.) Mr. R. Etheridge describes the fore-part of a 

 huge fish from the Lower Cretaceous of Queensland allied 

 to the well known Portheus and Ichthyodectes of the 

 same epoch. The specimen is provisionally assigned to 

 the former genus, with the designation /. marathonensis, 

 in reference to Marathon, its place of origin on the 

 Flinders River. Later on in the same journal Mr. W. J. 

 Rainbow makes an interesting addition to the subject of 

 social spiders. It appears that some time ago the museum 

 received two huge shawl-like webs taken from the 

 Jenolan Caves, the larger of which measures 12 feet in 

 length and about 4 feet in maximum width. Both webs 

 are closely wrought, and are evidently the work of a 

 large community of a spider referred to new species under 

 the name of .\maurobius socialis. 



To the May issue of the Proceedings of the Philadelphia 

 .Academy Mr. B. Smith contributes a suggestive paper on 

 senility in gastropods, mainly based on the study of the 

 Tertiary genus Volutilithes. In most extinct gastropods 

 changes of ornamentation may be observed as the earlier 

 are compared to the later whorls ; a normal succession of 

 such changes being noticeable, which varies but little in 

 widely sundered groups, although most families display 

 certain distinctive features in this respect. Infancy, youth, 

 and maturity are represented by distinctive styles in the 

 ontogeny of a species, but these stages cannot always, 

 perhaps from the imperfection of the geological record, be 

 correlated with ancestral types. Senile features, of which 

 several usually occur together in the last whorl, do not 

 all necessarily appear at exactly the same time in the 

 ontogeny. Senile- species or genera never transmit de- 

 scendants, being the terminal members of short branches. 

 Evolution among gastropods seems, indeed, to work some- 

 times rapidly and sometimes slowly, those forms in which 

 it is rapid and bizarre constituting the aforesaid senile 

 offshoots. 



REJUVEN.4TION (Verjungung) forms the subject of an 

 interesting communication by Mr. E. Schultz, of St. 

 Petersburg, to Biologisches Centralhlatt of July 15. Start- 

 ing with the fact that in the genital chamber of fasting 

 planarians not only may the whole organ be seen to 

 undergo a retrograde development to its original embryo- 

 logical condition, but the. differentiated epithelial cells 

 of this organ may be observed to lose their mutual con- 

 nection, to become rounded, and to resume their embryo- 

 logical state ; the author proceeds to argue that periods- 



