694 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. 11., No. 42. 



ganglia of the lumbar sympatlietic, and exercise 

 their influence on the blood-vessels by means of 

 these ganglia, and not through the hypothetical 

 peripheral ganglia of Goltz. Facts of the same gen- 

 eral import have been given before by the authors, 

 with regard to the last cervical and first thoracic 

 ganglia. — (Arch. depIiT/sioL, 549, 18S3.) w. ii. h. 



[401 

 Sexual variation of Rhytina. — Drs. Stejneger 

 and Dybowski have given in two different journals 

 a preliminary account of their joint discovery of a 

 remarkable variation, supposed to be sexual, occur- 

 ring in the skull of the arctic sea-cow. Their con- 

 clusions are based upon an examination of five adult 

 male and three adult female skulls. The male skulls 

 have the zygomatic arches both absolutely and rela- 

 tively wider than the female skulls. The whole cen- 

 tral portion of the former, also, is wider than that of 

 the latter. In the female the vertical ramus of the 

 mandible is longer than in the male, and the posterior 

 angles are much nearer together. It appears that 

 these differences have long been recognized by the 

 Eskimo. — (Proc. If. S. nat. inw., v. 19 ; Proc. zool. 

 soc. Loncl, 1883, 72.) F. w. T. [402 



ANTHROPOLOGY. 

 The death of King M'tesa.— Col. J. A. Grant, 

 once the guest of this renowned king of Uganda, 

 gives credit to the report of his death, ijublished in 

 the daily papers of the 13th of July. Some years ago 

 the king was suffering with a malady which the mis- 

 sionaries believed would terminate fatally unless an 

 operation was performed. The king was dissuaded 

 from this ; though the Africans, as a rule, operate upon 

 one another without fear. When Spel^e and Grant 

 visited him in 1862, he was a minor, the lineal de- 

 scendant of a line of thirty-five kings, which accounts 

 for the ' blue blood ' and vanity which certainly ran 

 in the veins of M'tesa. Col. Grant alludes to the 

 princes of Uganda, whom Stanley saw in chains, as 

 following a custom by no means irksome, to which 

 M'tesa himself had submitted previously to his elec- 

 tion. The vigor with which he administered his gov- 

 ernment, and his courtesies to travellers, have given 

 him a world-wide reputation. He raised his subjects 

 above the ordinary scale of Africans by making them 

 observe while travelling. He fearlessly adopted the 

 Mahometan, and afterwards the Christian religion, 

 by listening to the Mollahs and Christian travellers 

 who entered his country; his previous belief having 

 been in one supreme being and in charms. To 

 M'tesa is greatly due the discovery of the sources of 

 the Nile; for it was he who gave us the route from 

 the Victoria Nyanza to Egypt, and the knowledge 

 that we have of the people, and the flora and fauna, 

 of equatorial Africa. The army and navy of this king 

 is said to have numbered 125,000 soldiers. His gov- 

 ernment was carried on by daily durbars, where sev- 

 eral hundred chiefs of districts assembled with their 

 followers to hear the eloquence of the prime-minister 

 and members of the government. — (Proc. geogr. soc. 

 Lond., Aug.) J. w. p. [403 



The tribes of the Cunene, S. W. Africa. — 



The earl of Mayo, h.-iving spent the best part of a 

 year in Mossaraedes and its vicinity, gives us the 

 benefit of his experience. Not much new information 

 is conveyed about Portuguese rule; but a very inter- 

 esting account is given of a colony of Boers, at Hum- 

 pata, who, with their wives, children, and cattle, hail 

 trekked from Pretoria in the Transvaal, and reached 

 his place after seven years' wandering. The negro 

 tribes encountered were: 1. The Mundombes, hold- 

 ing the region from Mossamedes to Capangombe, at 

 the foot of the Sierra de Chella. They have a lan- 

 guage of their own, and belong to the Bantu family. 

 They are large cattle-keepers, and are the native por- 

 ters who carry travellers' luggage as far as the top of 

 the Sierra de Chella. 2. The Munhanecas and Qui- 

 pongos, tribes who inhabit the country around Ilum- 

 pata, Huella, and three days eastward. They are of 

 the Bantu stock, cultivate the soil, and are armed with 

 poisoned arrows, assegais, and knobkerries. 3. The 

 Chibiquas, who live on the west slope of the Sierra de 

 Chella, north of the Cun^n^ River. They belong to 

 the Damara race, intermixed with Ovampos, whose 

 language they speak. They capture the elephant by 

 prodding the hind-feet so as to sever the muscles. 

 The animal, thus brought to a st.andstill, is despatched 

 with assegais. 4. The North Ovampos, who speak a 

 dialect of the Damara language, and cultivate each an 

 hereditary farm, having no communal farming, as the 

 Hah^ and Huilla natives. — (Proc. geogr. soc. Land., 

 Aug. ) J. w. p. [404 



The Lolos of central China. — There is one 

 indigenous tribe or people, now completely envel- 

 oped by a Chinese population, which has success- 

 fully resisted the wave of Chinese encroachment. 

 They are termed ' Lolo ' by the Chinese, ' Lo-see ' and 

 ' Ngo-see ' in their own dialect. They inhabit a moun- 

 tainous region on the Tangtsze, between 27° and 29° 

 north. They make incursions into Chinese territory 

 for blackmail and ransom, which they call 'rent,' and 

 hold in slavery the Chinese then captured. We have 

 the word of Marco Polo that " they are a tall and 

 very handsome people, though in complexion brown 

 rather than white, and are good soldiers." They 

 never intermarry with the Chinese, even the Chinese 

 female captives being given to the male captives as 

 wives. Mr. Baber, who has closely studied these 

 people, seeks to identify them with the Colomon of 

 Marco Polo, and in the course of his argument makes 

 some interesting statements respecting their burial- 

 customs. They possess the art of writing; and 

 Major-Gen. Mesny, of the Imperial Chinese army, 

 some years ago obtained a thick folio manuscript 

 from a tribe near Chenning, in Kuei-chou (25° 

 north, 105° 40' west). The work is bound in goat- 

 skin with the hair on, and is written in the ordinary 

 Lolo script, with illustrations of a crude and primi- 

 tive nature, depicting human figures, animals, and 

 plants. Mr. Baber pays a just tribute to Baron v. 

 Richthofen and Col. Yule, in stating his conclu- 

 sions respecting the Lolos. — (Proc. geogr. soc. Lond., 

 Aug.) J. w. P. [405 



Ethnology of Timor. — In a letter addressed to 

 Sir Joseph Hooker, in 1880, Jlr. H. O. Forbes wrote 



