May ], 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



701 



emergencies as they arose, which were often 

 beyond any means of military or official solu- 

 tion. ' 



The remaining parts of the appendix give 

 detailed statements about the winding engines, 

 pumping plant and the relative value and 

 efficiency of various coals, African and Eng- 

 lish ; and the last section gives a tabular state- 

 ment of the yield of the mines, year by year, 

 since the consolidation in 1888. This is a 

 most remarkable body of statistics, well worthy 

 of careful examination. 



The report volume would be much more 

 valuable if a single good map of the region 

 dealt with so extensively in all the historical 

 chapters accompanied it. Two or three little 

 maps of special localities, and one of the rail- 

 road systems, in part, are all that are given. 

 The book has a good index, but is wholly lack- 

 ing in a table of contents, either at the be- 

 ginning of the volume or at the head of each 

 chapter. This again is a great defect. 



Mr. Williams has written a great book that 

 reads like a romance; and the tale of Sinbad 

 the Sailor and his valley of diamonds is as 

 nothing compared with the story of the dis- 

 covery of mines which up to the present have 

 produced more than $500,000,000 worth of 

 uncut diamonds — with little diminution of the 

 output in sight to-day; of the building of 

 cities and railroads in the wilderness ; of mines 

 equipped with machinery made in Chicago 

 and London — machinery that is almost hu- 

 man in its accuracy. The literature quoted 

 in the volume is an admirable exposition not 

 only of the history of the mines, but of the 

 entire South African region. From the find- 

 ing of the diamond by the children of Samuel 

 Jacobs, the handing of the crystals by van 

 Niekerk to a traveling trader, John O'Eeilly, 

 and the identification of it by Lorenzo Boyes, 

 to the working of a shaft to a depth of 1,400 

 feet, is a story without parallel. The wonder- 

 ful finding of the diamond on the Vaal River 

 on the Gong Gong, and discovery at Kimberley 

 only a few years later, are described so vividly 

 as to have an interest such as few works on 

 travel afford us. Here we have also the 

 story of the thousands of claims that seven- 

 teen years later were consolidated into a great 



corporation through the genius and organizing 

 powers of Cecil J. Rhodes. 



The discovery of diamonds in South Africa 

 has done more to open up that country than 

 all other industries together, for it was the 

 encouragement from the sale of diamonds that 

 precipitated the Matabele war which led to the 

 discovery of gold in the Transvaal, in value 

 many times exceeding that of the diamond 

 fields of the region. The change from a 

 multitude of individual claims, that gave the 

 district the appearance of gigantic ruins, to 

 the working by the shaft system was organized 

 under Mr. Williams's administration. The 

 employment of contract and native labor, the 

 latte^ often obtained more than 1,000 miles 

 from the mines, and the utilization of the 

 most approved mining machines, replacing the 

 old wheelbarrows and cradles of the earlier 

 days, meant that the cost of mining diamonds 

 was reduced to a fraction of what it was be- 

 fore, and that there was nothing to be feared 

 from the lowering of the price by dealers who • 

 purchased stolen material. When we realize 

 that South Africa has recently produced in one 

 decade more than ten times the value of all the 

 diamonds ever found in Brazil, and that this 

 immense production dates from the discoveries 

 begun in 1867, we may realize in a slight de- 

 gree how great a change has taken place in the 

 world's diamond production within the life- 

 time of a single generation. 



George F. Kunz. 



Vergleichenda chemische Physiologie der 

 niederen Thiere. Von Dr. Otto von 

 FxJrth, Privatdocent und Assistent am 

 physiologisch-chemischen Institut der Uni- 

 versitat Strassburg. Jena, Gustav Fischer. 

 1903. 



The progress which recent years have con- 

 tributed in the study of the comparative mor- 

 phology and physiology of animals has largely 

 been emphasized along non-chemical lines. 

 This is due not so much to an absence of 

 chemical data which are of interest and im- 

 portance in animal biology as to the difficulty 

 which the student has experienced in collect- 

 ing and correlating what has already been 

 ascertained in this direction. There is no 



