Al'RIL 29 IQC9] 



NA TURE 



!57 



A I r.ADiNG New England paper, the Springfield 

 Hcptihluaii, recently devoted an editorial article to the 

 subject of the popularising of scientific knowledge, as 

 suffgeslrd by a speech of Mr. Balfour's a few weeks ago. 

 .According to the American writer, the supply is not equal 

 to the demand. " Magazine editors who try to offer their 

 renders lirst-rate work are in despair for lack of qualified 

 writers. Newspaper editors who glean instructive notes 

 for their columns find a deluge of the hasty, the super- 

 ficial, the inaccurate, but seldom come upon really com- 

 petent and well-written work." As to men of science 

 themselves, their habits of intense and concentrated appli- 

 cation make them impatient of popular writing. " They 

 are experts, and when they write they write for experts. 

 They think habitually in technical terms, and when it 

 comes to explaining matters to an outsider they do not 

 know where to begin." The Springfield Republican offers 

 a practical suggestion to meet the difficulty. There should 

 be established in some university a post-graduate " depart- 

 ment of scientific interpretation," open to young men with 

 a literary gift and an interest in science, but too versatile 

 and active minded to make good specialists — men who had 

 already passed through scientific and mechanical courses 

 in their undergraduate years. " The head of their depart- 

 ment, if only his services were available, would be Prof. 

 Thomas H. Huxley." The purposes to be especially kept 

 in view in their training would be " the acquirement of 

 method, a clear comprehension of scientific principles, a 

 broad survey of current scientific work, comprehension of 

 the scientific type of mind, the ability to understand men 

 who cannot explain themselves, the technique of simplify- 

 ing, elucidating, illuminating by simile and analogy." 

 The Republican is confident that a training of this kind 

 would be an excellent preparation for all kinds of writers 

 for the Press. " They would be ground between scientific 

 accuracy and the demand for intelligibility as between the 

 upper and the nether millstone, and if they did not emerge 

 a finished product it would not be the fault of the process." 



Mr. E. Thurston's paper on " Native Man in Southern 

 India," delivered before the Royal Society of Arts on 

 March 25, is a popular and anecdotal resume of a subject 

 already dealt with by him in his " Ethnographic Notes 

 from South India," and the Bulletins of the Madras 

 Museum, of which he is curator. He points out that 

 while the population of the Tamil country and Malabar 

 is dolichocephalic, that of the more northern districts is 

 mesaticephalic or sub-brachycephalic. He declines to enter 

 into a discussion of the causes which may have led to 

 this variance of race type, and he thus tacitly rejects the 

 theory of Sir H. Risley, that the short-headed people of 

 the southern Deccan represent a Scythian immigration 

 from northern India. Mr. Thurston gives interesting 

 details of some curious customs — the dilation of the ear 

 lobes among Shdnan women ; the rule which forbids women 

 to drape the breast ; the use of leaf garments ; and the 

 gradual rise in status of the primitive jungle man, who 

 nowadays makes a caste mark on his forehead with ashes 

 or anilin dyes, and uses lucifer matches in lieu of the 

 old method of obtaining fire by friction. It is shown thaf 

 it is a popular misconception to suppose any of the non- 

 Aryan tribes to be woolly-haired, and the puzzling appear- 

 ance of the cross-bow as a weapon among the Ulladans 

 of Travancore is proved to be the result of Portuguese 

 inPiuence. 



We have received cuttings of several articles from the 

 Melbourne Argus, in which Mr. J. W. Barrett describes 

 the experiences of a party of tourists interested in natural 



NO. 2061, VOL. 80] 



history who made a new year's trip to some of the small 

 islands in Bass Strait. One of the features of the 

 excursion was a visit to the seal-rocks at Westernport, 

 where the seals which formerly frequented several of the 

 islands alone survive. It has been suggested that the 

 numbers of these animals should be reduced, on account of 

 supposed future injury to the fisheries, but, apart from 

 the fact that they do not usually eat fish, the writer points 

 out that their numbers have probably not altered appreci- 

 ably for centuries, and that the " balance of nature " is 

 almost certain to be maintained in the future. The trip- 

 also included an inspection of the wonderful breeding- 

 colony of gannets on Cat Island, where some 4000 of these 

 birds were nesting at the time of the visit. 



The heredity of the colour of hair in man is discussed 

 at considerable length by Gertrude and Charles Davenport 

 in the April number of the American Naturalist. As re- 

 gards the nature of the colouring, the authors consider 

 that there are probably two main types of pigment 

 in human hair, one a reddish-yellow, which finds its 

 highest development in bright red, and the other a sepia- 

 brown, the intensity of which ranges from light yellow to 

 dark brown and black. As the result of a combined study 

 of both eye-colour and hair-colour, the writers finally 

 arrive at the conclusion " that two parents with clear blue 

 eyes and yellow or flaxen straight hair can have children 

 only of the same type, no matter what the grandparental 

 characteristics were ; that dark-eyed and haired, curly- 

 haired parents may have children like themselves, but also 

 of the less developed condition. In the latter case what 

 the proportions of each type will be is, for a fairly large 

 family, predictable by a study of the immediate ancestry." 



We have received from the Bureau of Entomology of 

 the United States Department of Agriculture a paper by 

 Mr. J. J. Davis containing biological studies of three 

 species of Aphididae, the corn-root aphis (Aphis maidi- 

 radicis, Forbes), the corn-leaf aphis (Aphis maidis. Fitch), 

 and the sorghum aphis (Sipha [chaitophorus] flava, 

 Forbes). The life-cycle of the aphis is very curious, no 

 fewer than five forms being recorded for the corn-root 

 aphis, viz. winged viviparous females, wingless viviparous 

 females, oviparous females, males, and eggs. From the 

 eggs some ten to twenty-two generations of viviparous 

 females follow, but the last generation of the season 

 consists of oviparous wingless females and males, which 

 pair, and the females produce eggs. Evidence is adduced 

 to show that external conditions of temperature, &c., deter- 

 mine whether a particular generation is to be viviparous 

 or oviparous ; it is considered that aphides could repro- 

 duce parthenogenetically for an indefinite period if the 

 environment was favourable. The biological problems in- 

 volved are of great importance. Bulletin No. 66, by 

 F. H. Chittenden and H. M. Russell, deals with the 

 semi-tropical army worm (Prodenia eridania, Cram.), a 

 hairless caterpillar doing much damage to market-garden 

 crops. Arsenical sprays were found to be effective 

 against it. 



Mr. C. Baker, of 244 High Holborn, London, W.C, has 

 issued his quarterly classified list of second-hand scien- 

 tific instruments for sale or hire. He offers a very large 

 stock of microscopes and microscopic apparatus which, as 

 in the case of all instruments catalogued, have been in- 

 spected and where necessary repaired. The list also con- 

 tains a varied selection of surveying instruments and other 

 apparatus classified under eight sections. 



