OCIOBEB 22, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



575 



have been able to find are a brief mention in 

 Herbert H. Smith's " Brazil, the Amazons and 

 the Coast," p. 139 (1879), and my own allusion 

 to it in Entomological News, Vol. 6, p. 15 

 (1895). Are the termites themselves luminous 

 or is the phosphorescence due to some fungoid 

 peculiar to the termite hills? Certain it is 

 that the mounds are all phosphorescent. 

 Smith says : " The phosphorescence is in the 

 hills themselves, not, so far as I know, in the 

 insects"; yet, he does not appear to have in- 

 vestigated this question and his statement is 

 merely an opinion. The fact that no luminous 

 neuropteroid insects are known argues against 

 the theory that it is the termites themselves 

 that emit the light, yet observations on noc- 

 turnal insects in the tropics, particularly forest 

 insects, are so rare that such a property might 

 easily have escaped notice. Should the light 

 be caused by a fungus it must be one that is 

 peculiar to the termite mounds. In the latter 

 case, however, one would suppose that when, 

 by the clearing of the land, the nests are ex- 

 posed to the direct rays of the tropical sun the 

 fungus would be killed; but the mounds con- 

 tinue luminous even in the older clearings 

 where they have been exposed to the sun for 

 years. 



During my visit to Central America in 1905 

 I looked for termite nests in the hope of ob- 

 taining some data on this subject. However, 

 I saw no termite hills like those so common in 

 the Amazonian forests. The nests of Eu- 

 termes, the common form in Central America, 

 which are built on trees and constructed of 

 woody particles, gave entirely negative results. 

 On one occasion I broke open one of these 

 nests at nightfall to see if the termites within 

 were luminous, but they showed no trace of 

 phosphorescence. 



Frederick Knab 



the plant rem.wns of pompen 

 Beginndtg with the destruction of Krakatoa 

 in August, 1883, within the past twenty-five 

 years, a new era of catastrophism may be said 

 to have begun. The events of 1902 are still 

 fresh in the minds of most people; the de- 

 struction by earthquake on January 16 and 



April 18, respectively, of the tovras of Chil- 

 pancingo in Mexico and Quetzaltenango in 

 Guatemala; the eruption on May 8 of Pelee 

 with the annihilation of St. Pierre. The par- 

 tial destruction of San Francisco in April, 

 1906, due to a fault in the earth's surface 

 along the Pacific coast of America, and the 

 reawakenment of Vesuvius with the burial 

 of Ottajano, at the foot of the volcano, 

 are all too recent catastrophes. These 

 manifestations of nature's force were fol- 

 lowed by the destruction of Valparaiso in Au- 

 gust, 1906, and Kingston, Jamaica, in Janu- 

 ary, 1907. The most recent event in which we 

 see earth in the making, occurred at the 

 southern end of Italy on December 28, 1908, 

 when by an earthquake and tidal wave, the 

 cities of Messina, Catania and Eeggio were 

 shaken from their foundations. The events 

 of this horror are too recent to need comment, 

 but in view of the wide-spread interest in seis- 

 mic phenomena, the writer recalls a visit to 

 Pompeii in the summer of 1907, followed later 

 by a visit to the National Museum in the city 

 of Naples, where the art objects and objects of 

 commercial and domestic use are carefully 

 preserved from the destructive action of ash 

 storms, wind and water. A study of the ruina 

 of Pompeii, which was destroyed by ashes, 

 much as Ottajano was destroyed three years 

 ago, gives one the background to picture the 

 civilization of the ancient Pompeii ans, while 

 a study of the objects classified in the Na- 

 tional Museum enable the student to recon- 

 struct the daily life and industries of that 

 pleasure-loving people. Always interested in 

 such matters in a general way, the writer en- 

 deavored to find what materials in such a 

 museum bore upon the study of plants. With 

 this in view, the museum was searched and a 

 small collection of the plant remains of the 

 buried city was found in one comer, and the 

 labels in modem Italian attached to the speci- 

 mens were copied, making a list of twenty 

 plants or plant parts, that could be identified 

 certainly in the fragmentary condition in 

 which they were preserved in the dwelling 

 houses beneath the layers of ashes and pumice 

 stone vomited forth by the volcano. The list 



