September 22, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



427 



commonly man himself, very rarely other ani- 

 mals. Both these tapeworms are rather 

 highly specialized and do not appear to be 

 readily adaptable to other hosts. The conclu- 

 sion seems clear that man has been eating 

 cattle and pigs or their immediate ancestors, 

 and perhaps himself, for as many ages as 

 needed for these tapeworms to attain their 

 present degree of differentiation. We have no 

 evidence that species of any kind are rapidly 

 produced, and the parasites have probably had 

 as slow an evolution as man himself. The fish 

 tapeworm has other definitive hosts than man, 

 notably the dog and the evidence is not con- 

 clusive that early man was piscivorous. The 

 ease, however, with which man becomes in- 

 fested with this parasite might indicate that 

 he had eaten uncooked fish for a long period. 



The adaptability of trichina, Trichine.Ua 

 spiralis, for man and pigs is rather significant 

 in this connection, but trichina seems to thrive 

 so easily in almost any mammalian host that 

 not much weight can be attached to that para- 

 site as indicating a pork diet for early man. 



The idea of the concomitant evolution of 

 these human parasites, of man, and of the ani- 

 mals serving as food for him and intermediate 

 hosts for the parasites has interested me for 

 some time. It has recently been brought to 

 the foreground by Gregory's " Studies on the 

 Evolution of the Primates " 1 in which he so 

 graphically describes (pp. 342-344) the evolu- 

 tion of human food habits. On different 

 grounds from parasitology Gregory concludes 

 that the wild boar was " one of the first 

 medium-sized animals that the nascent Homi- 

 nidse would be successful in killing." The 

 only other animal mentioned by him as prob- 

 able food of early man is the horse. Our 

 knowledge of the beef tapeworm seems to indi- 

 cate that Bos taurus or its progenitors were 

 eaten as well as early horses. There is nothing 

 to show that horses were not eaten, unless the 

 rather widespread abhorence of eating horse- 

 flesh at the present time can be construed that 

 man never adapted himself to that diet as he 

 did to beef. 



i Bull. Amer. Mus. Nat. Hist., Vol. 35, pp. 239- 

 355, June 16, 1916. 



It is not beyond possibility that the ac- 

 quirement of a meat diet by the vegetarian 

 pre-men may by improvement of nutrition, by 

 shortening of digestive processes, and by 

 stimulating properties of proteins and their 

 split-products have played an important part 

 in man's evolution over his vegetarian com- 

 petitors. 



M. W. Lyon, Jr. 



Geobge Washington University 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 



Napier Tercentenary Memorial Volume. 

 Edited by Cargill Gilston Knott. Pub- 

 lished for the Eoyal Society of Edinburgh 

 by Longmans, Green and Company. Lon- 

 don, 1915. Pp. xii 4- 422. Price, $7.00. 

 The International Congress which met at 

 Edinburgh from Friday, July 24, to Monday, 

 July 27, 1914, to commemorate the tercentenary 

 of the publication of John Napier's " Mirifici 

 Logarithmorum Canonis Descriptio " was the 

 last great international assembly of scientists 

 before the Great War. Appreciations of Eng- 

 lish scientists and congratulatory addresses 

 by German scientists and German univer- 

 sities, in honor of an Englishman, will prob- 

 ably not soon be seen again. 



The variety of interests touched by such an 

 invention as logarithms, in its developments, 

 is so well illustrated by the papers of this 

 memorial volume that it seems desirable to pre- 

 sent the list. 

 "The Invention of Logarithms," by Lord Moul- 



ton, president of the congress. 

 "John Napier of Merchiston," by Professor P. 



Hume Brown, University of Edinburgh. 

 "Merchiston Castle," by George Smith, master of 

 Dulwich College, formerly headmaster of Mer- 

 chiston Castle School. 

 ' ' Logarithms and Computation, " by J. W. L. 



Glaisher, Trinity College, Cambridge. 

 ' ' The Law of Exponents in the Works of the Six- 

 teenth Century," by Professor David Eugene 

 Smith, Columbia University. 

 "Algebra in Napier's Day and Alleged Prior In- 

 ventions of Logarithms," by Professor Florian 

 Cajori, Colorado College. 

 "Napier's Logarithms and the Change to Brigg's 

 Logarithms," by Professor George A. Gibson, 

 University of Glasgow. 



