6i6 



NA TURE 



[October 17, 1907 



Lot me give a concise account of what I Icnow in regard 

 to this matter. At the end of June of this year Mr. 

 Weigall, the Government inspector in the Service des 

 Antiquit<5s at Lu.xor, acting on the instructions of M. 

 Maspero, the director-general of that department, sent me 

 a skeleton to be examined and leported on. The slieleton 

 was practically complete, for, although the face, certain 

 ribs,, and part of the pelvis were brolcen, most of the frag- 

 ments were sent. Mr. Weigall told me that the bones 

 were found in their coffin in a tomb opened by Mr. Theo- 

 dore Davis in January last, and that they were supposed 

 to be the rerriains of Queen Tii. Moreover, he has assured 

 me that no possible mistake could have been made, because 

 he himself and Mr. Ayrton had packed the bones, and they 

 were received and unpacked by me in the anatomical 

 department of the Cairo School of Medicine. The fact 

 that the bones were soaked with paraffin wax, and that no 

 other skeleton is known to have been so treated in Luxor, 

 puts their identity beyond all doubt. 



The skeleton is undoubtedly that of a young man of 

 about twenty-five years of age. 



It does sometimes happen that a skeleton presents 

 features of such an indefinite character that even the most 

 experienced anatomist hesitates before expressing an 

 opinion as to sex; but these bones do not fall into such 

 a category. All of them, and especially the skull, pelvis, 

 and leg-bones, present the male characteristics in such a 

 pronounced or even exaggerated form that a junior student 

 of anatomy would be considered exceptionally stupid if he 

 failed to recognise the sex. The skull is big and heavy- 

 jawed, the frontal sinuses and superciliary ridges are 

 exceptionally large, even for a man, and the mastoid pro- 

 cesses are typically masculine ; although the skull is 

 exceptionally capacious, the face is disproportionately big. 

 On the evidence of the cranium alone the sex is obvious. 



The pelvis exhibits the most characteristic masculine 

 features. The shape of the pubes and the pubo-ischial rami, 

 the size and shape of the subpubic angle (67°), the form 

 of the obturator foramen, the proportions of the pelvic 

 cavity, and the shape of the iliac bones all conform to the 

 definitely male type. The femur also serves to demon- 

 strate the male sex in its size, inclination of shaft, and 

 size of head. 



Mr. Theodore Davis and those who have disseminated 

 extracts from his letters have dealt rather unfairly with 

 the two medical men, whose opinions they quote, in giving 

 such wide publicity to statements which could have been 

 made only in the most casual manner by anyone with any 

 medical training whatsoever. It is so absurd as to be 

 altogether incredible that " a prominent American 

 obstetrician " would quote the figures go° to 100° for the 

 female subpubic (misquoted " pelvic " by Prof. Sayce and 

 Mr. Hall) angle, and 70° to 75° as the average for this 

 angle in the male, with the object of demonstrating the 

 fc,malc sex of a pelvis the subpubic angle of which is 

 oulv 67° ! 



But, quite apart from the very obvious male characters 

 of the skeleton, there are even more obtrusive features 

 equally fatal to the possibility of it being Tii's, which 

 could hardly have escaped the observation of a medical 

 man, however casual. 



The teeth are practically unworn ; three of the 

 "wisdom" teeth had just been "cut," and the ' fourth 

 was only just emerging from the jaw at the time of 

 death ; and a large number of epiphyses on ribs, vertebrie, 

 clavicles, sternum, and pelvis were either separate or in 

 process of joining. In other words, the bones are clearly 

 those of a person of about half the age Queen Tii is known 

 to have reached. 



The archaeological and historical remarks in Mr. Hall's 

 letter do not concern me. 



In a short time I shall publish a full account of this 

 skeleton, with photographs exhibiting the evidences of sex 

 and age, and the points of similaritv and dissimilaritv to 

 the mummies of Amenhotep III., Yuaa, Thua, 

 Thothmes IV., and perhaps some other royal mummies 

 of the eighteenth dynasty. 



G. Elliot Smith. 



Anatomical Department, The School of Medicine, 

 Cairo, October 4. 



-' NO. iq8i, vol. 76] 



The Interpretation of Mendelian Phenomena. 



Although it is impossible within the limits of a short 

 letter to attempt an answer to the question of the bear- 

 ing of " Mendelism " upon biological problems in general, 

 there are one or two points in Ur. Archdall Rcid's letter 

 in Nature of October 3 which seem to require discussion. 



Dr. Archdall Reid begins with the following state- 

 ments : — " Mendelian phenomena are possible only when 

 reproduction is bi-j)arental. They cannot occur, of course, 

 when it is parthcnogenetic." In the first of these state- 

 ments the expression " bi-parental " should not be taken 

 too literally, since in the majority of cases of Mendelian 

 inheritance investigated hitherto the method of so-called 

 self-fertilisation has been employed. I hope I may be 

 pardoned for the assertion that the second statement is 

 a little premature. For my own part I shall certainly 

 await the result of experimental evidence upon the point 

 before accepting it as conclusive. 



In the absence of Dr. Archdall Reid's definition of what 

 he means by " the problem of sex," I am not sure that 

 I entirely understand the remainder of his first para- 

 ,5raph ; but the suggestion may be made that " the func- 

 tion of se.x," " the causation of variation," " retrogression 

 of characters," and " mode of development " arc less 

 immediately to the purpose in the present condition of 

 biology than the problems of the actual method of trans- 

 mission of existing characters. Upon the problem of the 

 " alleged transmission of acquirements " Mendel's facts 

 may even be said to throw some light ; but in any case it 

 seems rather severe treatment to belittle the importance 

 of a biological discovery merely because it does not 

 immediately lead to the solution of all the most difficult 

 problems which biology affords. 



Once more it must be repeated that the appearance of a 

 blended first cross is no criterion of non-Mendelian inherit- 

 ance. In the case of a problem like that of man, com- 

 plicated as it is by the fact that he has " crossed more 

 often than any other animal," and further rendered 

 intractable by the circumstance that he is not amenable to 

 experiment, a great difficulty arises in discovering which 

 are the actual allelomorphs concerned. For these natural 

 characters pay no heed to our definitions ; so that if an 

 investigator makes the mistake of first rigidly defining 

 the " characters " with which he proposes to deal, and 

 does not keep a perfectly open mind, prepared to revise 

 his definitions in the light of the evidence which experi- 

 ment alone can afford, he runs a great risk of finding 

 only confusion where a proper analysis would have shown 

 the presence of perfectly definite methods of inheritance. 

 It would be extremely interesting to students of genetics 

 to learn upon what evidence Dr. .Archdall Reid bases his 

 positive statement that there is no segregation in the case 

 of the mulatto. 



There is certainly occasion for surprise in finding it 

 maintained that "nature selects only mutations"; but 

 that natural conditions lead to the obliteration of a host of 

 mutations is as fair a deduction from the fact that such 

 mutations appear under cultivation as the current deduc- 

 tion that the conditions of cultivation actually cause the 

 occurrence of this kind of variation. We have the testi- 

 mony of de Vries and others that the former process 

 actually takes place. That the latter process does so is 

 an assumption which still lacks the support of facts. 



R. H. Lock. 



Botany School, Cambridge, October 7. 



The Colour of Dye Solutions. 



It is generally accepted th.it the colour of dye solutions 

 depends upon the chemical structure of the dye, and colour 

 changes are usually attributed to some change in consti- 

 tution ; but certain recent investigations on colloidal solu- 

 tions show that this argument must be accepted with 

 caution. It is well known that colloidal solutions of the 

 metals are highly coloured. Further, it is recognised that 

 many dyes exist in solution in what, for lack of a better 

 term, muSt be called the colloidal state. Some observ- 

 ations of my own point to the following statement as 

 being true for certain dyes ; — 



The absorption spectrum of the dye in solution m.-iy be 



