JuLy 11, 1912] 
NATURE 
485 
Recent issues of The Agricultural Journal of the 
Union of South Africa have contained a series of 
interesting papers by Dr. Theiler on gall sickness in 
cattle. The disease shows certain relationships with 
redwater, and is caused by parasites of the red blood 
corpuscles, which are called anaplasms to mark their 
analogy with the piroplasms causing redwater, and 
are transmitted by ticks. Mr. Burtt-Davy con- 
tributes papers on poisonous plants found in the 
country. Many of these are known to the natives, 
some being used for arrow poisons, others for 
criminal purposes, while others again are used by the 
Kaffir doctors, who, however, have kept their know- 
ledge so secret that white men have been unable to 
obtain it. Attention is directed in other papers to 
the value of the fig crop and the methods of working 
it up for the market. 
An interesting lecture on the investigation of the 
highest strata of the earth’s atmosphere by Dr. A. 
Wegener (Marburg University) is printed in Himmel 
und Erde, Heft 7, 1912. He refers to the great dis- 
coveries made by meteorological observations in kites 
and balloons, which have already placed our ideas of 
the structure of the atmosphere on quite a new basis. 
The decrease of temperature with altitude was 
formerly considered to continue to the limits of the 
atmosphere, but the observations above referred to 
have shown that the decrease ceases at an altitude of 
about 11 kilometres, and that higher temperatures 
are recorded at much greater heights. But it is not 
with these low altitudes that Dr. Wegener is mostly” 
concerned, but with the regions in which certain 
luminous phenomena are frequently observed, which 
show that at heights exceeding 200 and _ pos- 
sibly 500 kilometres an atmosphere of appreciable 
density still exists. The article is accompanied by 
some excellent photographs of aurore and meteors, 
and with opinions of different investigators relating 
to them. The author’s investigations have led him 
to conclude that in the highest strata there must be 
an unknown gas, in addition to hydrogen, and lighter 
than this. For this gas he proposes the name “ geo- 
coronium,” from its similarity to the unknown 
““coronium”’ of the solar atmosphere. 
Few places have suffered so repeatedly from 
destructive earthquakes as the island of Zante. Since 
the Venetian occupation of the island in the fifteenth 
century, there have been nineteen disastrous shocks, 
the two latest of which occurred on January 24 and 
25 of the present year. These earthquakes and their 
successors form the subject of an interesting paper 
by Mr. G. Bonavia, the director of the Eastern Tele- 
graph Company in Zante (Boll. della Soc. Sismol. 
Ital., vol xvi., 1912, pp. 59-67). The epicentre was 
submarine, and lay between the islands of Zante and 
Cephalonia, but probably nearer to the latter, since 
it was in this island that the principal disasters 
occurred. Up to the end of April, the two initial 
destructive shocks have been followed by twelve 
strong, thirteen moderate, and forty-eight slight 
shocks. 
Mr. VERSFELD has recently examined geologically 
two areas in German South-west Africa, and has 
reported the results of his survey in the South African 
No. 2228, vo. 89] 
| Journal of Science (vol. vii., 1911, No. 8, pp. 332-339, 
with two maps). He describes a part of the country 
extending from the Orange River for two hundred 
miles northward, and including the area around the 
hot springs of Warmbad. Most of the country is 
occupied by gneiss and granite covered with outliers 
of the Table Mountain Sandstone, upon which rest 
patches of Dwyka conglomerate. This ancient glacial 
deposit must have been very widely spread across the 
district, and at different places rests directly on all 
the rocks present. It is the youngest rock represented 
in the area, so that Mr. Versfeld concludes that the 
district has been a land surface since Carboniferous 
times. The second part of this report deals with the 
diamantiferous gravel along the coast near Luderitz 
Bay. The gravel has been described as Cretaceous 
and as marine, owing to the presence of marine 
shells; but these so-called fossils are only recent 
mussels and limpets which have been carried inland 
by the Hottentots. Mr. Versfeld explains the gravel 
as a subaérial deposit, and regards the diamonds as 
part of the débris from many diamond pipes. The 
statement that the matrix of the diamonds had been 
discovered in the district rests upon their occurrence 
in some cemented gravels. 
We have received a separate copy of Prof. Mie’s 
paper on the foundations of a theory of matter which’ 
appeared in the Annalen der Physik for March. The 
theory is founded on the assumption that electric and 
magnetic fields occur within, as well as without, 
an electron; that electrons, in fact, are not bodies 
embedded in the ether, but portions of the ether 
itself in a special state, which we designate electric- 
ally charged. With the further assumption that the 
principle of relativity holds and that the electric and 
magnetic fields, the electric charge and its velocity” 
suffice to specify completely all phenomena of the 
ether, Prof. Mie proposes to explain in the first in- 
stance why indivisible electrons exist, and why the 
existence of matter should imply necessarily the law 
of gravitation. Further instalments of his paper will 
be awaited with interest. 
THE early history of Chinese mathematics is dis- 
cussed in a short note by Prof. D. E. Smith in The 
Popular Science Monthly for June. That the Chinese 
were not behind other nations in their study of 
geometry and algebra is shown by (a) references to 
the Pythagorean proposition and a primitive trigono- 
metry in the Chow-pi (supposed 1100 B.c.); (b) Chang 
Tsang (152 B.c.), who restored the ‘‘ Arithmetical Rules 
in Nine Sections’’ (possibly 2650 B.c.), containing use 
of negative numbers, trigonometry of right triangles 
and simultaneous equations; (c) Sun-tsu’s anticipation 
of the Diophantine analysis (probably in the third 
century); (d) the approximations to z, by Tsu Ch’ung- 
Chin (428-499 a.D.), including the limits 31415926 and 
3°1415927; (e) Wang Hs’iao-t’sing’s approximate solu- 
tions of the cubic in the seventh century. About the 
thirteenth century we find anticipations of Horner’s 
method, analytical trigonometry, the so-called Pascal’s 
triangle, spherical astronomy, and other work which 
leads the author to describe the period as the golden 
era of native Chinese algebra. 
