November 28, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



783 



Of the Annamese we learn that the king usu- 

 ally rode on an elephant when he appeared in 

 public; sometimes he was borne in a sort of 

 hammock by four men. At court ceremonies 

 his throne was surrounded by thirty female at- 

 tendants, armed with sword and buckler. A 

 curious custom in warfare was to bind five 

 men together in one file; if one tried to run 

 away the whole file was condemned to death. 



The implicit faith in the virtue of written 

 charms is illustrated by the proceedings to be 

 taken when one of the people was killed by a 

 tiger or a crocodile. In this case the high 

 priest was ordered to write out a number of 

 charms and scatter them about at the spot 

 where the person was killed. Such was be- 

 lieved to be the power of the charm that the 

 guilty animal would be invariably attracted 

 to the place, but before he could be done away 

 with, a royal order had to be secured.^ 



The jewel treasures of Ceylon always ex- 

 cited the wonder and admiration of the early 

 travelers to that island, and Chau Ju-Kua is 

 no exception to this rule. His description of 

 the king's personal appearance is scarcely 

 flattering. He is black, with unkempt hair 

 and bare head, his body only covered with a 

 cotton cloth of various colors wound about 

 him, but of his abode we read :" 



" His palace is ornamented with cat's-eyes, 

 blue and red precious stones, carnelians and 

 other jewels; the very floor he walks upon is 

 so ornamented. There is an eastern and west- 

 ern palace, and at each there is a golden tree, 

 the trunk and branches all of gold, the flow- 

 ers, fruit and leaves of cat's-eyes, blue and red 

 precious stones, and such like jewels. At the 

 foot of these trees are golden thrones with 

 opaque glass screens. When the king holds his 

 court he uses the eastern palace in the fore- 

 noon and the western in the afternoon. When 

 (the king) is seated, the jewels flashing in the 

 sunshine, the glass (screens) and the jewel- 

 trees shining on each other, make it like the 

 glory of the rising sun. 



" The king holds in his hand a jewel five 



5 O'p. cit., pp. 47, 48. 



6 Op. cit., pp. 72, 73. 



inches in diameter, which can not be burnt by 

 fire, aild which shines (in the darkness of) 

 night like a torch. The king rubs his face 

 with it daily, and though he were passed 

 ninety he would retain his youthful looks." 



The throne of the king of Cambodia was 

 made of " the seven precious substances," with 

 a jeweled dais and an ivory screen. He was 

 said to have 200,000 war elephants — a glaring 

 exaggeration — and four large bronze ele- 

 phants, each weighing 4,000 catties, stood as 

 guards about a bronze tower or temple in the 

 capital. 



A strange test of true royalty is noted in 

 Palembang, eastern Sumatra. Here the royal 

 cap was of gold, studded with hundreds of 

 precious stones, and of such crushing weight 

 that few were able to wear it. On a king's 

 demise all his sons were summoned together 

 and the one who proved strong enough to bear 

 the weight of this cap was proclaimed as the 

 new sovereign. 



The few details we have cited from this 

 work will give some idea of the interest and 

 value of the volume, and the full and scholarly 

 notes with which it has been so liberally pro- 

 vided by its translators and editors add much 

 to its worth as a book of reference. 



George F. Kdnz 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



FURTHER EXPERIMENTS ON OVARIAN TRANSPLAN- 

 TATION IN GDINEA-PIGS 



For several years we have been engaged in 

 studying the effects of ovarian transplantation 

 upon the inherited color characters of young 

 guinea-pigs developing from eggs liberated 

 by a transplanted ovary. Our method has 

 been to transplant the ovary taken from an 

 animal of one color variety into the body of 

 an animal of a different color variety and 

 then to observe whether the young showed the 

 color characters of the mother which bore the 

 young or of the animal which furnished the 

 ovary, or of both. In 1909^ we reported the 

 first crucial experiment bearing on this ques- 



1 " A Successful Ovarian Transplantation in the 

 Guinea-pig and its Bearing on Problems of Genet- 

 ics," Science, N. S., Vol. 30, pp. 312-314. 1909. 



