July 1, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



21 



The comparative anatomical part of the 

 book is to be heartily commended. There are 

 a number of errors here, but considering the 

 large scope of the work and the rapidly en- 

 larging knowledge of anatomy, these are 

 readily pardoned. 



As a whole the volume has the faults of its 

 virtues — to mention the latter first; it accom- 

 plishes the author's purpose of making the 

 evolutionary theory the framework for many 

 otherwise uncorrelated facts. To do this the 

 treatment has been made a priori and is there- 

 fore scarcely in accord with the method which 

 has yielded the material of the book. 



Leonard W. Williams 



The Blach Bear. By William H. Wright. 



Illustrated from photographs by the author 



and J. B. Kerfoot. New York, Charles 



Scribner's Sons. 1910. 

 ' This is one of the most refreshing books on 

 wild animals which it has been the writer's 

 pleasure to read for some time. It is, in a 

 way, a monograph on the habits of a single 

 species of North American mammals. The 

 book, which is a small one of only 127 pages 

 with 12 photographic illustrations, is well 

 worth the attention of those interested in the 

 life histories of our living mammals. The 

 observations recorded in the pages of this lit- 

 tle book are those of a hunter-naturalist with 

 a tendency toward scientific thought. 



The book opens with a story of the capture 

 of a cub of a black bear in the forests of the 

 ' Bitter Root Mountains, in Idaho. The inter- 

 est in the story is somewhat broken by the 

 introduction of a chapter on the classification 

 of bears, which might profitably have been 

 omitted, since it draws only a smile from the 

 trained mammalogist and usually contempt 

 from popular readers. The chapter on de- 

 scription and distribution, as well as the ones 

 on habits and food, is quite good. The ob- 

 servations are those of an actual acquaint- 

 ance of the bears made through twenty-five 

 or thirty years' experience in tramping the 

 forests and mountains of the west. Natural 

 history would be much sounder and natural- 



ists much wiser if we had more productions 

 like " The Black Bear." Roy L. Moodie 

 The University of Kansas 



A'OTB.S' ON ENTOMOLOGY 

 The "candle-fly" of China, like the "lan- 

 tern-fly " of South America, was long thought 

 to be luminous; now it has been investigated 

 by Messrs. J. C. W. Kershaw and G. W. 

 Kirkaldy and found to be entirely without 

 light -giving powers."^ The adults suck the sap 

 of several kinds of trees; the eggs (about 80) 

 are laid in straight rows on the bark of the 

 trees, covered with a hardening fluid, and 

 brushed over with a white waxy material. The 

 young feed on various plants, but are not 

 easily discovered, since the head is prolonged 

 in a thick rough process resembling a broken 

 twig. The Pyrops secretes a mass of waxy 

 threads, which collects over the wax-pockets 

 and near the spiracles; a species of mite lives 

 in this material. The adult insect is the host 

 of a remarkable parasitic moth (Epipyrops), 

 as many as three in one insect. 



A RECENT number of the Memorias do Insti- 

 tuto Oswaldo Cruz (Rio Janeiro, Vol. I., 1909) 

 contains two articles of interest to entomolo- 

 gists. One by Dr. A. Lutz, " Beitrag zur 

 Kenntnis der brasilianschen Simuliumarten," 

 is a revision of the black flies of South Amer- 

 ica. Eleven species are recognized, six being 

 described as new. The other article is by 

 Dr. C. Chagas, " IJeber eine neue Trypano- 

 somiasis des Menschen," pp. 159-218, 5 pis. 

 This disease is similar to the African sleeping 

 sickness, and is considered to be transmitted 

 by certain blood-sucking reduviid bugs, espe- 

 cially Conorhinus megistus Burm. A small 

 species of monkey, Callithrix pencillata, is 

 thought to be the reservoir of the disease. 

 One of the plates illustrates the Conorhinus. 



An elaborate investigation into the amount 

 of variation within a genus has been com- 

 pleted by A. Delcourt." He selected the 

 aquatic hemiptera of the genus Notonecta, 



' " A Memoir on the Anatomy and Life-history 

 of the Homopterous Insect, Pyrops candelaria 

 (or Candle-fly)," Zool. Jahrh., Abt. Syst., XXIX., 

 pp. 107-128, 1910, 3 plates. 



