August 12, 1909] 



NA TURE 



195 



lislifd in our last number. They have just been placed 

 on exhibition in the gallery of fossil reptiles in a case 

 near the remains of Iguanodon, with which it is interest- 

 ing to compare them. Besides portions of skulls, jaws, 

 teeth, and limb-bones, there are also fragments of the 

 remarkable skin-impressions which have been described 

 by Prof. Osborn. 



It may be remembered that the late Mr. Harry Barnato 

 left by will the sum of 250.000/. for the purpose of found- 

 int; some charity in the nature of a hospital, or kindred 

 institution, in commemoration of his brother, Mr. Harney 

 Barnato, and his nephew, Mr. Woolf Joel, both of whom 

 died before him. After full and careful consideration of 

 the merits of the many schemes put before them for the 

 disposal of the money, the trustees have now decided 

 upon applying it to the building and endowment of an 

 institution for the reception of cancer patients. With the 

 view of increasing the potentialities of the bequest, the 

 new institution will be administered, except as regards its 

 finance, in connection with the Middlesex Hospital, and 

 the trustees have procured a suitable site in Nassau Street, 

 adjoining tms hospital's special cancer wai'ds. The 

 trustees, with Prince Francis of Teck, Lord Cheylesmore, 

 Sir John Purcell, K.C.B., and Mr. Felix Davis, will 

 form the committee which has been entrusted with the 

 tasic of putting in train and carrying out this project. 



The Rev. F. St. John Thackeray, vicar of Mapledurham, 

 gives in the Spectator of April 7 a few interesting stanzas 

 from Tennvson's works to show the poet's appreciation 

 of scientific truth. Tennyson and Darwin were born in 

 the same year, and they did not meet until 186S, but 

 many years previously the poet wrote the words, " So 

 careful of the type she seems, So careless of the single 

 life." Here, it is held, there is a suggestion of the prin- 

 ciple of natural selection ; and in other poems written 

 before Darwin's work appeared there are anticipatory ex- 

 pressions upon the development of living organisms from 

 simple to inore complex forms " Till at last arose the 

 man." Mr. Thackeray points out that Lord Tennyson 

 savs in his notes in the Eversley edition, " My father 

 brought ' Evolution ' into poetry. Ever since his Cam- 

 bridge days he believed in it." It must not be forgotten, 

 however, that the idea of evolution, as opposed to the 

 doctrine of special creation, has been under discussion for 

 quite twenty-four centuries. Greek philosophers, with 

 their natural curiosity, considered the problem in detail ; 

 and six hundred years before the commencement of our 

 era the idea of the marine origin of life was put forward 

 by Thales. But recognition of the process of evolution 

 is quite a different matter from the discovery of the cause. 

 So far as we read Tennyson's lines we find in them no 

 clear anticipation of Darwin's views as to variation and 

 natural selection being the prime factors of organic evolu- 

 tion. Mr. Thackeray's letter shows that Tennyson was 

 familiar with the general principle of development, but it 

 provides little evidejice that he anticipated the principle 

 formulated by Darwin. 



An interesting piece of antiquarian work has just been 

 completed by the Essex Field Club by means of a grant 

 from the Essex County Council. It appears that in the 

 time of Charles L so much of this country had become 

 " afforested " that the inhabitants of those districts subject 

 to forest law found the conditions so burdensome that 

 relief was applied for and sanctioned by the King, who 

 authorised the restoration of the boundaries of all the 

 forests to what they had been in the twentieth year of 



KO. 2076, VOL. Si] 



the reign of James 1. This Act was passed in 1640, and 

 in compliance therewith a court of inquiry was held at 

 Stratford in 1641 in order to fix the boundaries of the 

 Waltham Forest, an area comprising the forests known 

 subsequently as Hainault and Epping. The Perambula- 

 tion resulting from this " inquisition " set forth very 

 explicitly the limits accepted by the commissioners. In 

 defining these boundaries, natural features and the main 

 (Roman) Colchester road were adopted for the western, 

 northern, and southern limits respectively, but on the 

 eastern side, where no well-defined natural or artificial 

 features existed, certain stones, named and dated, were 

 put up. In 1894 these long-forgotten boundary stones 

 were re-discovered and identified by Prof. Meldola, who 

 published a paper about thein in the Essex Naturalist in 

 1895. The stones had been badly treated in later times, 

 as several had been uprooted, and were found in ditches 

 near their original sites. Last year the matter was 

 formally brought under the notice of the Essex County 

 Council, which body authorised the re-erection of the 

 stones by the club at a cost not exceeding 100!. The 

 work has now been completed, and a meeting of the club 

 and of representatives of the County Council went over 

 the district on July 31. Out of eight stones seven have 

 been identified with certainty, and the site of the eighth 

 has also been marked. The stones have been set in solid 

 concrete beds, and an appropriately inscribed tablet let 

 into the foundation of each. The Essex Field Club is to 

 be congratulated in having rescued from complete oblivion 

 this chapter in the history of a district the greater part of 

 which is rapidly becoming covered with the bricks and 

 mortar of the modern builder. The forest in 1641 began 

 " at the Bridge of Stratford called the Bow." 



We learn from the Revue scicntifique that an Inter- 

 national Congress on Radiology is to be held in Brussels 

 in 1910. 



It is stated that the Museum of Natural and Physical 

 Science at Barcelona was destroyed during the riots in 

 that city on July 28. 



We have received the first number of a journal pub- 

 lished at Skagen under the title of Fiskcrhfiskolens 

 Beretning, and devoted to the schools which have recently 

 been established in various parts of the country for in- 

 struction during the winter in all matters connected with 

 fisheries. 



Imitation in monkeys forms the subject of an article 

 by Mr. M. E. Haggerty in the August number of the 

 Century Magazine. The monkeys experimented upon 

 exhibited five phases of imitative behaviour, summarised 

 as (i) simple arrest of attention; (2) following; (3) re- 

 action to locality ; (4) reaction to an object ; and (5) exact 

 repetition in detail of an observed action. By No. i is 

 meant the watching by one monkey of the action of 

 others, or, in other words, " looking," while No. 2, or 

 " following," indicates a higher grade of mental action, 

 and so on through the series. 



.According to the report for 1907-8, the collections in 

 the Transvaal Museum are increasing so rapidly that the 

 accommodation afforded by the present building is 

 altogether inadequate, this being notably the case with the 

 mounted specimens of large mammals, of which a con- 

 siderable number was added during the year under review. 

 In the study collections the congestion is even worse, and 

 as these include a great number of rare, and in certain 

 instances unique, specimens, the urgent need of extension 

 is evident. 



