June 27, 1912] 
NATURE 
439 
urged the need of an Institute of Technical Optics, 
where students of optics will be trained in optics by 
men whose work is optics. 
year. 
the London County Council, and questions have been 
asked in Parliament, yet in vain. It has been sug- 
gested that two separate schools are needed—one for 
optical workmen, the other for optical calculators, 
the latter to be a mere small department in one of 
the universities or colleges. Such a divorce of prac- 
tice and theory would be futile. What is wanted is 
an establishment where the whole atmosphere is one 
of optical interest, where theory and practice go hand 
in hand, where the mathematician will himself grind 
lenses and measure their performance on the test 
bench, where brain-craft will be married to hand- 
craft, where precision, whether in computation or 
workmanship, will be a dominating ambition. 
As yet the only attempt made towards this ideal is 
the optical department of the Northampton Poly- 
technic in Clerkenwell, where a handful of students 
are housed in wholly inadequate surroundings. In 
the future institute the teaching must be thorough 
and independent, and free from all ulterior domina- 
tion of examinations. The examination blight, which 
has cramped education in so many ways, has brought 
us to this pass, that outside the centre just named 
there is not a college student in Great Britain who 
is being trained in optics for its own sake. The 
moral is obvious. 
be properly housed and equipped as a self-contained 
monotechnic, concentrating all its energies on the one 
aim. On no consideration whatever ought it to be 
under the baneful influence of a university, where its 
students would be diverted from whole-hearted devo- 
tion to progress by the temptation of degree-hunting. 
Would that this convention might make it clear to 
those in authority that the optical industry is in 
deadly earnest in demanding the establishment of such 
a centre of optical training. 
BIRD NOTES. 
tal the May number of, The Zoologist Mr. J. M. 
Dewar discusses the evolutions performed by 
flocks of certain kinds of wading birds of the family 
Charadriidz. These evolutions, which are based on 
a simple type common to the whole family, but fre- 
quently comprise specialised additions, are believed by 
the author to be of a defensive and protective nature, 
the essential form of movement being an imitation of 
the sea-spray. ‘‘When the flock is large the move- 
ments are often sectional, and what seems to be a 
succession of waves passing through an extended 
flock is in many cases an extremely quick repetition 
of the simpler form of the evolutions by sections. 
The *‘ sheet-movements’ which provide much of the 
spectacular display are rendered possible by the same 
circumstance, and generally grow out of the simpler 
form. . . . In other words, one may say the simpler 
evolutions are imitative in character and protective in 
purpose; in the complex evolutions the simpler 
imitative movements are partially hidden by the 
development of a wealth of movement which is still 
protective in purpose, but which, as regards character, 
is incapable at present of a simple and comprehensive 
explanation.” 
Despite the fact that the work of the two sexes 
can be easily distinguished, it appears from a note in 
the May number of Witherby’s British Birds that 
there is a dearth of trustworthy observations in 
England to show whether male or female wood- 
peckers excavate the nesting-hole, or whether both 
NO. 2226, vor. 89] 
The need grows year by | 
Deputations from the trade have waited on | 
The future optical institute must | 
| 
i 
combine in the task. Continental observers are, how- 
ever, generally agreed that the cock is the worker, 
and if this be so the same thing doubtless obtains in 
Britain, despite certain statements as to both sexes 
of the green woodpecker having been seen at work 
together. 
In completing his notes on the bush-birds of New 
Zealand in the April issue of The Emu, Mr. J. C. 
M’Lean observes that, inclusive of the bush-hawk 
and the morepork, twenty-one species of North Island 
birds may be classed as arboreal, and of these sixteen 
have been identified in the Maunga-Haumia bush. 
Possibly two others should be added to the list; but 
it is probable that the huia—now very scarce every- 
where—never extended so far north. The stitch-bird 
seems to have been exterminated in the district, if not 
also on the mainland. 
REE 
COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN MELANESIA.1 
| the interests of his topographical work the author 
of the memoir under consideration was obliged to 
be almost constantly on the move; though this ren- 
dered any intensive study of a special people impos- 
sible, yet it afforded him opportunities for personal 
comparison of various peoples and cultures over a wide 
area. He has worked up the older sources with great 
care, and in many instances extends his comparisons 
to America, as he is anxious to see a full treatment 
of Malayo-Polynesian affinities with South American 
cultures worked out; the cursory treatment of this 
vast theme in Graebner’s “ Bogenkultur”’ he regards 
as quite inadequate and faulty in method. 
The ethnological section of the memoir (pp. 28-167) 
deals primarily with western New Britain, of which 
our knowledge has been hitherto slight, also with 
the other German possessions in Melanesia, and com- 
parative data from Indonesia and America are added. 
The physical anthropology is very incomplete, partly 
through the author’s misfortune in losing his appa- 
ratus when his boat overturned; head-indices should 
have been worked out in addition to giving lists of 
head-lengths and -breadths. As regards material cul- 
ture, Dr. Friederici has been careful to ascertain the 
distribution of different objects and customs wherever 
possible, and he gives a useful account of the various 
forms of houses observed, and the association of 
divergent types, with a number of diagrams of dwell- 
ings and plans of certain villages. Considerable cul- 
tural complexity and wide variation physically are of 
course .to be anticipated in an area situated like the 
Bismarck Archipelago on the great highway of migra- 
tion; in fact the author states (p. 316) that a con- 
siderable proportion of the natives are directly trace- 
able to the ‘“Alfurus’’ of eastern Indonesia, whose 
modified descendants are a relatively recent element 
in the Bismarck Archipelago and other Melanesian 
areas. : 
In the discussion of affinities the author emphasises 
the importance of linguistic evidence, and the present 
volume contains a sketch of the grammar of the 
Barriai language of the northern coast of western 
New Britain. He makes it a practice to give the 
native names of cultural objects described, and is 
a strong advocate of the retention of native place- 
| names, which are already familiar to traders in the 
locality, and to which after all belongs the priority. 
1 “ Wissencchaftliche Ergebnisse einer amtlichen Forschunesreise nach 
dem Rismarck-Archip=! im Jahre 1908."" Il. “ Beitrage zur, Volker- und 
Sprachenkunde von Deutsch-Neuguinea.”” By Dr. Georg Friederici. Pp. 
(Mitt. aus den Deutschen Schut7gebeiten, Ergan- 
vi+-324+iv plates +map { 
=a . Ernst Siegfried Mittler & Sohn, 1912.) Price, 
zungsheft Nr. 5.) (Berlin: 
separately, 3.60 marks, 
