September 19, 1907] 



NA TURE 



525 



tenary of the great Swedish naturalist. The collection, 

 consisting of portraits, autographs, manuscripts, specimens 

 and books, is arranged in one of the bays of the great 

 hall, and a small pamphlet, prepared by Dr. .\. B. Rcndle, 

 explaining the different exhibits has been issued as the 

 third of the special guides of the museum. 



.As ingenious but difficult hypothesis, tracing the origin 

 and evolution of ahgiosperms to aposporous developments 

 from a type allied to the thallose liverworts, is offered by 

 Mr. O. F. Cook in vol. ix. of the Proceedings of the 

 \\'ashington Academy of Sciences. It is suggested that as 

 aposporous prothalli arise from the sporophyte in certain 

 varieties of Nephrodium pscudo-mas, so the gametophyte 

 of the primitive angiosperm may have had its origin ; the 

 proposition requires the elimination of the macrospore, and 

 leads to the comparison of the nucellus with an aposporous 

 prothallus, thus running counter to accepted homologies. 

 It cannot be said that the arguments advanced are 

 sufficiently weighty to warrant a reversal of existing 

 opinion. 



The third part of the botanical series of the Philippine 

 Journal of Science (vol. ii.) contains determinations of new 

 or little-known indigenous ferns, and a collation of species 

 of Dryopteris, both prepared by Dr. H. Christ, and the 

 diagnoses of new Philippine palms, by Dr. O. Beccari ; 

 also Mr. E. D. Merrill contributes a first list of Philip- 

 pine botanical literature. Dr. Christ notes that there is 

 a tendency to the production of insular reduced types 

 among the ferns, instancing the irregularity and reduction 

 of fronds in Dryopteris canescens^ and the peculiar stunted 

 forms grouped under Leptochilus heteroclitus and Pteris 

 heteromorpha. A new species of Christensenia, more 

 recognisable under the generic name Kaulfassia, is de- 

 scribed. Dr. Beccari's communication includes three 

 species of Areca, one as robust as Areca catechu, als( 

 species of Pinanga, Arenga, Livistona, and Calamus. 



Mr. R. N. Hall, in his " Notes on the Traditions ot 

 South -African Races, especially of the Makalanga of 

 Mashonaland, " reprinted from the African Monthly, 

 and published by the .African Book Co., Ltd., Grahams- 

 town, has revived his controversy with Mr. R. Maclver 

 regarding the date of the Zimbabwe temple. In his 

 reply to the theorv that the ruins cannot be dated earlier 

 than the fourteenth or fifteenth century A.D., he lays 

 special stress on the statement of De Barros that, on the 

 arrival of the Portuguese at Sofala, about 1505, the Moors 

 informed them that the temple was then ancient, and 

 that the Makalanga possessed no tradition of its erection. 

 It is obvious that on such a question the oral traditions 

 of savages are of little value. But Mr. Hall discusses at 

 length various lines of evidence, which, he believes, 

 establish the permanence of such_ traditions among the 

 Bantu races — their veneration of ancestors, their gene- 

 alogies of royal families, their belief that their forefathers 

 migrated from the north, their tales of the early Portu- 

 guese occupation, of cannibalism, the slave trade, and so 

 on. He further asserts that the Makalanga have been 

 less migratory than their Bantu kinsfolk, and hence their 

 belief in the extreme antiquity of the Zimbabwe is deserv- 

 ing of credit. On the other hand, he admits that these 

 traditions were not recorded at the time when Europeans 

 first came in contact with them. On the whole, the 

 Makalanga traditions in the versions now accessible do 

 not command perfect confidence, and they do not furnish 

 conclusive evidence in disproof of the' archaeological facts 

 on which the conclusions of Mr. Maclver were based. 



The third part {the second in order of issue) of the 

 Eugenics Laboratory Memoirs has just been issued by 

 Messrs. Dulau and Co. It is entitled " The Promise of 

 Youth and the Performance of Manhood," and contains 

 the results of an inquiry, by Mr. Edgar Schuster, into the 

 question how far success in the examination for the B.A. 

 degree at Oxford is followed by success in after-life. Apart 

 from the Oxford class lists, the investigation is based on 

 " Crockford " and Foster's " Men at the Bar." The 

 results show a striking relation between the earlier and 

 later success. Thus among those who took their degree 

 in 1859 or previously, and subsequently entered the 

 Church, 68 per cent, of the first-class honours men 

 obtained some clerical distinction or first-class scholastic 

 appointment, whilst the percentage falls to 37 per cent, for 

 the second-class men, 32 per cent, for the third class, 

 29 per cent, for the fourth, 21 per cent, for those who 

 took pass degrees, and q per cent, only for those who took 

 no degrees. The results in the case of those subsequently 

 called to the Bar are similar. Taking a rougher division, 

 32 per cent, of those who obtained first to fourth-class 

 honours subsequently obtained some form of office or 

 appointment that was reckoned as distinction, whilst only 

 16 per cent, of those who obtained pass degrees or no 

 degrees did so. It would seem from these figures that the 

 degree examinations are a better test of general ability, 

 and not of a merely special type of ability, than is 

 generally believed. It seems a pity that these memoirs 

 cannot be issued at a lower price, or, preferably, published 

 in some recognised journal. 



Dr. Gustav von Zahn contributes to Nos. 5 and 6 of 

 the current volume of the Zcitschrift der GeseUschaft fiir 

 Erdkunde a paper on the physical and economic geography 

 of the isthmus of Tehuantepec. The author visited the 

 isthmus in October, 1906, and devoted special attention to 

 existing and possible routes across it as means of inter- 

 oceanic communication. His conclusions are strongly in 

 favour of a new Transpacific route from Salina Cruz. 



.A LECTURE delivered before the Versammlung deutscher 

 Naturforscher und Arzte at Stuttgart by Prof. Dr. E. 

 Hammer in September last is reprinted in Petcrmann's 

 Mitteilungen (vol. liii., p. 97). Prof. Hammer discusses 

 the scales of maps most useful for geological and general 

 economic purposes, favouring 1 : 25,000 for ordinary publi- 

 cation. He lays great stress on the need for such maps 

 bearing some indication of the degree of accuracy of the 

 contour lines shown, as well as of the actual determin- 

 ations of height upon which the contours depend. 



The Mitteilungen of the Vienna Geographical Society 

 contains (vol. 1., p. 139) an interesting paper on the 

 " zonal " distribution of rainfall, by Dr. Fritz von Kerner. 

 The author has repeated and extended the measurements 

 of Loomis's rainfall maps made by Sir John Murray, using 

 the more recent maps of Supan, and gives the rainfall in 

 belts of latitude, first for all longitudes and also for the 

 eastern and western old world and the new world 

 separately. Detailed comparisons are given with Murray's 

 results, and also with the measurements of Bezdek pub- 

 lished in 1904. Supan's maps for the four seasons are 

 treated in a similar way, the accuracy of the work being 

 tested by comparing the sums of the four seasonal values 



■ with those obtained independently from the map for the 

 ; whole year. 



■ The most noteworthy feature in the report of the 

 ; Mauritius Observatory for 1906 is the shortage of rain- 

 fall ; the annual amount for the island (mean of fifty- 



NO. 1977, VOL. 76] 



