314 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



is world-wide. Our T is simply the tau symbol, and is called tee or tail. 

 The medicine men represent the tau sometimes on the forehead. The 

 ancients used to mark the captives who were to be saved with a tau or 

 cross ; Ezekiel refers to this, and the word he uses for " the sign " to be 

 marked on the foreheads of them that are to be saved, really is the "tau " 

 or " cross." No one had divined why the scarab was so sacred. He was 

 led to a solution by seeing an exaggerated tau cross on the back of a 

 scarab. On looking into the Egyptian name for the scarab, he found it to 

 be tore, and that the sutures on the beetle form a tau cross. Wilkinson 

 represents a god with a scarab for a head, one of the names of which was 

 Tore. Apparently the same name is applied in this country by our 

 peasantry — tor-beetle or dor-beetle. The use of the pre-historic or pre- 

 Christian cross is world-wide. This is an ingenious and plausible explan- 

 ation, and one that deserves to be made known to English naturalists; but 

 whether it will be acceptable to those of them who are philologists is a 

 question upon which some expression of opinion would be interesting. — 

 J. E. Harting. 





NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS, 



Castorologia : or the History and Traditions of the Canadian 

 Beaver. By Horace T. Martin. 8vo, pp. 238. With illus- 

 trations. London, Stanford ; Montreal, Drysdale & Co. 



Under the infelicitous name of ' Castorologia/ almost as 

 suggestive of a disagreeable plant as of an animal, Mr. Martin 

 has brought together a good deal of interesting information upon 

 a subject upon which we have had no separately published 

 treatise since that of Morgan.* He is not really responsible for 

 the invention of the word in question, but only for its adoption ; 

 since so long ago as 1685 a Latin treatise by one John Marius 

 appeared at Augsburg with the title ' Castorologia explicans 

 Castoris animalis naturam et usum medico-chemicum.' This of 

 course related to the European Beaver, and chiefly to the 

 medicinal properties of the so-called " castoreum," which was 

 then held in great esteem as a panacea for all sorts of ailments. 



The European and American Beavers were long thought to 

 be specifically identical, until, in 1825, F. Cuvier pointed out the 



* ' The American Beaver and his Works,' 1868, 



