590 
food, which they sometimes steal from such of the coast huts as 
are temporarily vacated or occupied only by a few aged or infirm 
folk whom they are able to surprise or overpower.” In 1876 
and 1881 a few members of this tribe living near the north-east 
of Great Nicobar were seen by the late Mr. de Roepstorff, who 
was accompanied in the latter year by Col. T. Cadell, V.C., 
Chief Commissioner of the Andamans and Nicobars. During 
the last eighteen months Mr. E. H. Man, while in charge of the 
Nicobar Islands, has paid six visits to Great Nicobar, on four of 
which he succeeded in seeing and photograhing parties of this 
tribe, both near Ganges Harbour and on the west coast. On 
the first of these occasions (viz. February 1884) two youths, aged 
about eighteen and fourteen years respectively, were persuaded 
to leave their friends for seven days, at the end of which they 
were conveyed back from Nancowry in the settlement steamer. 
During their visit to Mr. Man they proved themselves tractable 
and timid, and submitted with a good grace to ablutions which 
were fonnd very necessary. Although this is the first recorded 
instance of a Pen having ventured from his savage haunts, these 
lads exhibited the Oriental characteristic absence of wonderment 
at all the novel surroundings and tokens of civilisation in the 
Government settlement. They were fair specimens of their race, 
the members of which are found to be usually well nourished, of 
good physique, and, while young, favoured with pleasant features. 
The height of the males appears to range between 5 feet 2 inches 
and 5 feet 8 inches; their skin is fairer than that of the 
generality of the coast people, who, on their part, are less dark 
than the Malay ; the hands and feet seem to be decidedly large, 
and bear evidence of the rough work of their daily lives ; the 
hair, which is straight, is commonly worn uncut and unkempt, 
and, as habits of cleanliness are manifestly foreign to their 
nature, its condition can better be imagined than described. As 
a result of their friendly intercourse in recent years with the 
coast people, they have acquired the habit, so universally prac- 
tised among the latter, of chewing the betel-nut (Chavica bet/e) 
with or without quicklime, and are consequently beginning to 
be similarly disfigured with black teeth, though not yet to the 
hideous extent common among their more civilised, or, rather, 
less savage, neighbours. They likewise now imitate the latter 
in respect to clothing, the men adopting the narrow loin-cloth 
and the women a small cloth skirt. Their dwellings are small, 
and cannot compare with those of the coast people, and are 
indeed but little, if at all, superior to those of the Negritos in 
Little Andaman, but they more nearly assimilate the former in 
design. as well as mode of construction, for they are erected on 
posts; the floors being raised 6 or 7 feet above the ground 
necessitate the use of ladders. It is impossible, within the 
limits of this abstract, to make further mention of the dwellings, 
or to describe the peculiar sack-like cooking-vessels of this 
strange race. Mr. Man hopes before long to be able to supple- 
ment in many particulars the rudimentary information which has 
hitherto been obtainable regarding the Pei, but the task is one 
of considerable difficulty, for, apart from the dread entertained 
by this tribe towards aliens, their frequent feuds place from time 
to time a temporary barrier to all intercourse between them and 
our friends on the coast, through whom at present all our com- 
munications have to be conducted. The nearest portion of 
Great Nicobar Island is, moreover, about 60 miles distant from 
the Government settlement at Nancowry. 
SCIENCE IN RUSSIA 
THE Kazan Society of Naturalists continued last year its 
valuable explorations of Eastern Russia,. and we have 
before us several new fascicules of its Memoirs and Proceedings. 
M. Ivanitsky publishes a list of plants of the Government of 
Vologda, which contains 804 Spermatophyte, Gymmosperme, 
and Sporophyte. As to these last, only 6 Equisetacez, 5 
Licopodiacez, and 20 ferns being given, the list obviously will 
be much extended by subsequent research. The flora of 
Vologda, which is situated on the limits of the middle and 
Arctic Russian floras, offers a certain special interest, and 
M. Ivanitsky has not neglected to mention the wild and culti- 
vated plants which find their northern limits within the province. 
It consists chiefly of Compositeze (107 species), 49 Cyperacez, 
48 Graminez, 41 to 34 each of Ranunculaceze, Caryophyllez, 
Rosacez, and Crucieerz, 27 to 22 Papilionacez, Scrophulariz, 
“Trudy Obschestua Estestuoispytatelei pri Kazanskom Universitete, 
vol. xii. fasc. 5 and 6; vol. xiii. fasc. 1 to 4.—Protokoly (Proceedings) of 
the same for the years 1883 and 1884. 
NATURE 
[ Oct. 15, 1885 
Labiate, Salicineze, and Polygonacez, and 21 to 19 Umbelli- 
ferze, Filices, and Orchidez. The list of plants is prefaced by 
a masterly sketch of the physical conditions of separate parts of 
the province. The same volume contains a paper by. M Mis- 
lavsky on the irritability of the nervous-muscular system, being 
an inquiry into the causes of the well-known differences of the 
effects of electrical irritation on the frog, when measured by the 
methods of Dubois-Reymond. All causes which may depend 
upon the conditions of the experiments themselves having been 
eliminated, there still remain notable differences which must be 
ascribed to the state of the system altogether. A paper, by Th. 
Tsomakion, on the laws of transmission of electricity through 
gases, embodies the results of several new experiments in this 
field. Ina former inquiry the author, by introducing into the 
chain of condensation a discharger where the discharge could 
take place only at close contact of the two electrodes, had ex- 
perimentally proved the law, already deduced by Forselman and 
Heer, that the whole amount of heat produced at the discharge 
of the condensator does not depend upon the composition of the 
chain. But as soon as he introduced a Jayer of gas between the 
electrodes, he found that his results widely differed from all 
previously obtained by other students ; he undertook a series of 
experiments for discovering the sources of that discrepancy of 
results, and he has arrived at a long series of conclusions which 
are of great interest, but ought to be submitted to a closer 
inquiry. This last is continued.—To the same‘vol. xiii. M. 
Zaitseff contributes a paper on the petrography of the crystalline 
rocks in the neighbourhood of Krasnovodsk, on the eastern 
shore of the Caspian. The chief rock in the Shakh-Adam 
Mountains, which reach about 600 feet above the sea, is a 
massive, unstratified quariz-dioritic porphyrite (according to the 
classification of Herr Rosenbusch). Between the bays of Mura- 
vioff and Soymonoff the rocks are closely akin to the above, and 
might be described asa quartz-mica-diorite. The former extendsalso 
for some miles east of Krasnovodsk, and is intersected by veins of 
a muscovite-granite (according to Herr Rosenbusch’s classifica- 
tion) and quartz porphyry of rare occurrence, its magnesial 
mica being replaced by a potassium mica.—The same author 
contributes two papers on the petrography of the Soymonoff 
valley in the south-east part of the district of Ekaterinburg, 
which incloses the 3200 feet high Yurma summit and several 
high ridges of mountains. The author makes a detailed inquiry 
into the structure of the crystalline rocks of this locality (granites, 
gneisses, and various schists), and is inclined to admit that at 
least one part of the olivine-bearing serpentines endow their 
origin to the metamorphism of the actinolite schists. The iron 
ores and gold-bearing deposits are also described, the age of 
these last being undoubtedly settled as Post-Pliocene, as they 
contain numerous remains of Mammoth, Sos primigenius, Cer- 
vus carandus, and Cervus alces. ‘We may remark that the very 
high position of several gold-bearing deposits on the slopes of 
the valleys and their structure is one testimony more in favour 
of their glacial origin, but the author does not touch this inter- 
esting question. He mentions also—a fact which has often been 
doubted, but is now confirmed more and more—that the gold of 
these deposits is derived from the decomposition of the chloritic 
slates. The papers are accompanied by a geological map. In 
the same volume (fasc. 4) we find a preliminary report, by S. 
Korzinsky, on a botanical excursion into the delta of the Volga. 
The list of plants is not yet given by the author, and he pub- 
lishes only a valuable sketch of the general characters of the 
delta, distinguishing in it two different regions: the delta proper, 
which consists of fluviatile deposits; and the Steppe region, 
covered with the so-called dougry, or a kind of Lames, first 
described by Karl Bear and still bearing his name, about which 
dougry the author holds a different opinion as to their origin, 
denying—with full right, we suppose—their origin from the 
retreat of the Caspian. 
As to the Proceedings of the Kazan Society, we are glad to 
learn from them that three new meteorological stations (at Sara- 
pul, Tcherdyn, and Debessy) have been added to those already 
organised by the Society. There was a great want of meteoro- 
logical observations precisely for that part of North-East Russia. 
Several shorter papers are embodied in the Proceedings :—On 
the geology of the Vetluga region, by P. Krotoff (a polemic 
concerning the Permian and Trias, as also the southern limit of 
the boulders).—On the fauna of Kazan (between the Kama and 
Vyatka), by N. Varpakhovsky. The author gives the lists 
of fishes found in the lakes and rivers, and lists also of 
| serpents and amphibians of the region.—On the preparation 
