TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION H. 879 
religion. Every writer about the Burmese and their customs mentions the Nats. 
The subject is, however, still but vaguely understood. The Nats are of three 
distinct kinds: (1) the supernatural beings due to the Buddhist cosmogony ; (2) the 
supernatural beings familiar to the creatures, objects, and places with which man 
is concerned due to the prehistoric animistic beliefs of the people; (3) the super- 
natural beings who are ghosts and spirits of the notorious dead. Of the many 
orders of Nats thus created, that of the Thirty-seven Nats is by far the best known 
among the people. These are the ghosts of the departed royalties of fame, and 
their connections. About them nothing seems to have been previously published 
in England, and this paper is a preliminary attempt at an adequate representation 
of them, and of the history, real or supposed, connected with them during life. 
The paper was illustrated by a map in order to explain the relative position of the 
laces chiefly connected with the very complicated political history of Burma and 
its numerous dynasties, so far as these are concerned with the stories related of the 
Thirty-seven Nats. The paper was further illustrated by a lantern slide of an image 
of each of the Thirty-seven Nats from the unique and authentic collection of large 
carvings of them in teak wood by Burmese artists in the possession of the author. 
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 20. 
The following Report and Papers were read :— 
1. Report on recent Excavations in the Roman City of Silchester. 
See Reports, p. 495. 
2. Two New Departures in Anthropological Method.1 
By W. H. BR. Rivers, /.D. 
When in Torres Straits with the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition, two 
methods were employed to record the colour of the skin quantitatively. Numerous 
records were taken with Lovibond’s Tintometer, and these were fairly satisfactory, 
although the dark skins of the natives were found to be difficult objects to match 
exactly. More satisfactory matches were made with the colour top, but this 
method is open to the objection that the coloured paper discs used on the top are 
liable to fade, while the glasses used in the Tintometer have the advantage of 
being constant. Records were taken of the colour of various Melanesians and 
Polynesians, as well as of the two races of Torres Straits. The following match 
of the skin of the Mamus (chief) of Murray Island is given as an example: 
15:0° Orange + 6:0° Yellow + 7:0° White + 332-0° Black. 
The second contribution to anthropological method is the collection of social and 
vital statistics by means of genealogies. In Murray Island and in Mabuiag 
genealogies going back for three to five generations were compiled which included 
nearly all the present inhabitants of these islands. In working out these genealo- 
gies, the only terms of relationship used were father, mother, child, husband, and 
wife, and care was taken to limit them to their English sense. The trustworthi- 
ness of the genealogies was guaranteed by the fact that nearly every detail was 
derived independently from two or more sources. It was found that these 
genealogies afforded material for the exact study of numerous sociological questions ; 
thus the system of kinship can be worked out very thoroughly by finding the 
native terms which any individual applies to the other members of his family, ze. 
the subject can be investigated entirely by concrete examples, and abstract terms 
of relationship derived from European sources entirely avoided. The genealogies 
1 The methods and their results will be published iz extenso in the Report of the 
Expedition. 
