THREE BOOKS OF TRAVEL.*
MR. SAVAGE LANDOE entered Persia by way of the Caspian Sea, and journeyed through Teheran, Isfahan, Yezd, to Kerman ; and then, making a wide loop up to Birjand and down to Sher-l-Nasrya, followed the boundary between Beluchistan and Afghanistan, on the Beluch side, to Quetta. He saw, therefore, the Persian on the Russian frontier, the Persian more or less untouched of Kerman and Yezd, and the Sistanis and the Beluchs of the North- West Frontier. On the whole, his estimate of the modern Persian is hardly a flattering one. The Persian has stood still now for a long time, and the exceedingly delicate position in which his country lies, speaking geographically, has not disturbed the fatal dolce far niente of inherited indolence. It is a very poor country, and the average Persian, according to Mr. Savage Landor, is not a business man. He has no idea of turning over his capital, but regards hard cash like the man with one talent did,—wealth too valuable to be risked, and safer secretly buried. Thus the Persian is behind other Oriental races, and far more childish in some respects. The rich men take care that the exterior of their houses gives no indication of internal wealth. Experience has taught them some bitter lessons, and they only do what the Jews did in bygone times, and the Timbuctoo merchant does to-day. The Persian is obviously very much the creature of circumstances, and Mahommedanism has, as usual, fatally stereotyped his non- progressive characteristics. It would appear, however, that Mahommedan though he be, the moneyed Persian is not above adding to his gains by loans at usurious interest. One is afraid, indeed, that only the worst features of European enter- prise have caught his fancy. The unearned increment must have a peculiar fascination for the philosophic Persian, who is practically a sensualist and a visionary, retaining only the hereditary gift of imagination. As regards trade, it may be a comfort to some to be told that certain English goods retain their pride of place notwithstanding the most strenuous com- petition. Englishmen, too, when they lose certain angularities of manner, are acceptable to the Persian. Mr. Landor, ã.s • (1) Across Coveted Lands. By A. H. Savage Lander. S vols. London : Macmillan and Co. [30s.]—(2) The Tanganyika Problem. By J. E. S. Moore. London : Hurst and Blackett. r25e.]—(8) 4 Naturalist /ndian Seas. By A. Alcock. London : John Murray. [18s.] • the title of his book suggests, discusses the practical side of these countries and their inhabitants, and puts the Persian before us as he would appear to the average intelligent European. Our author does not look at humanity through rose-coloured spectacles, and he will forgive us if we say that he-is perhaps a little blind to the finer side of Oriental races, at least in summing up the value of a type. Some of the
• most interesting pages in Mr. Landor's travels relate his views of and wanderings among the ancient cities of Sher-i-Rustam -and &Man and Kala-i-Kakaha.—" the city of roars of ' laughter "—which have been decayed since the days of the Seljuks. There is something very stimulating to the imagina- tion in the ruins of these vast cities and houses of legendary heroes half buried in oceans of shifting sand. Mr. Landor's photographs of them are excellent. His two volumes are furnished with maps and charts of his journeys and numerous photographs. He is always readable, is an entertaining observer, especially of men and manners, and has plenty of humour.
It is remarkable that while some of us were looking forward to flooding the Sahara with salt water, not a thousand miles away, in the very heart of the African Continent, the remains of a veritable inland sea existed, with the living descendants of molluscs and fishes that were general to all the waters of the globe. The "Tanganyika problem" surely affords one of the greatest triumphs of biology and deductive evolution that the students of those sciences can show. Mr. Moore introduces the problem in some very able chapters which should leave the intelligent reader nothing to complain of in the way of clearness. And the facts as stated must have an extraordinary fascination for the imagination of the evolutionary biologist. All the great fresh-water lakes of the world have a fauna which has descended from ancient marine forms and has common characteristics, the waters of the globe in those days being probably no more than brackish. This is called the "primary fresh-water series." There are also species and forms depen- dent on temperature and derived from neighbouring seas, more or less local, and these Mr. Moore calls the "secondary fresh-water series." The Central African lakes have these series, and Tanganyika and the Caspian have also the " halolimuic series," which seems to be a complete, that is, a comprehensive, -series in itself, and not remnants of much modified forms of displaced species. It is supposed, and not unreasonably, that the sea suffered some change about the period of the deposition of the secondary rocks ; Nature, as the geolo- gists point out, exercised a very severe revision of the living species of the ocean, killing many, driving others probably into fresh-water arms of the sea, and creating new marine forms. Slow as this change must have been—no human ingenuity could imitate it experimentally—it was rapid enough to produce a break in the long succession of forms of fossils. These changes still left the peculiar halo- limnic series of Tanganyika unaccounted for. But an extra- -ordinary resemblance between certain shells in Tanganyika and those which once lived in Jurassic seas, an almost equally startling likeness of certain prawns and jellyfish to fossils of the same ancient period, and, in the case of a sponge, even to a Silurian form, give Tanganyika an age as a lake of vast antiquity, which has retained this " old guard," the " halolimnic series," along with the ordinary fresh-water forms. This is the Tanganyika problem, and it possesses great possibilities. The Congo has one or two curious survivals of the series peculiar to Tanganyika, which seem to indicate that the lake was once part of the Atlantic. • But interesting though that may be, it is insignifi- cant compared with the idea we are asked to consider,—that Lake Tanganyika, or a body of water there or thereabouts, has survived the geological changes which have visited the globe since the Jurassic Period. This is chiefly due to a great upheaval of the backbone of the continent in a line running north and south, and a crumpling of the surface. Subterranean forces are still at work in Africa, though not so very long ago we were told the contrary.
Mr. Moore has given us in The Tanganyika Problem one or two characteristic landscapes of the lake scenery,— Massa, Shims, and Tanganyika, with their alluvial flats, and the stages by which he conceives the park-like lands have arisen on the torrid saline flats; the growth of euphorbias, the increasing shade which these queer trees have given to the colonies of plants at their foot, and the subsequent decay of the tree choked by the vegetation which its fostering care has encouraged. Lake Shirwa, with its flight of flamingoes, looks too beautiful to be a lake so salt that barely any life exists but in the months of the rivers which run into it. Most of Mr. Moore's space is taken up with con- sidering the fauna of the thirteen lakes, and the position occu- pied by Tanganyika with regard to the others, and by the exami- nation and description, with numerous plates, of the species which have raised the most interesting question concerning the evolution of marine fauna. It is a pity that the re- searches on Lake Rukwa, which is intimately connected with Tanganyika, are not yet available. From the days of Herodo- tus one has been in the habit of expecting something new from Africa, and the last development yields to no former wonder in revealing an historical secret stranger than any monstrous fiction of the old or mediwval world.
The life of a naturalist must be a happy one if he can roam Indian seas dredging up apparently never-ending wonders from the great deep, and is also animated with a real love and capacity for appreciating the marvellous adaptation of animals to their surroundings. Dr. .A.lcock has the gift of revealing to others the beauties and incom- parable ing,enuities of Nature in providing for her children, and his Naturalist in Indian Seas is a genuine story- book, full of charm and possessing a graceful and distinct literary quality, notably refined and with plenty of quiet humour. One could extract dozens of examples of their sur- prising contrivances for defending themselves, for seeing and being seen, and for developing or doing away with limbs no longer necessary to creatures plunged in darkness and buried under the enormous weight of a superincumbent ocean. In the Bay of Bengal, at a depth of eighteen hundred fathoms and a temperature of 35 degrees Fahrenheit, "p itch-dark and freezing cold as this part of the submarine plain is, we dis- covered," says Dr. Alcock, "nearly fifty species of animals which must actually live upon it." He tells us that where conditions are uniform and life flourishes, that life must be diversified. Hence in this abysmal darkness as many as thirty-six different genera, and ultimately five sub-king- doms, are represented by the fifty species. While some of these creatures have quite lost their sight, one, a hermit-crab, has good eyes, though where it gets light to see by we do not know, unless the sea anemones who are found living on its shell are phosphorescent. In medium depths, while there is any trace of daylight left, eyes appear to be developed and enlarged in many crustaceans and in fishes; then in the great depths, while shrimps abandon the use of eyes, hermit crabs still have a small but efficient eye; and fishes are content to go blind after the thousand-fathom limit. The sense of smell, of course, in the fishes and crustaceans makes up for blindness; but one naturally supposes that their range is limited. Such creatures as retain their sight at a thousand fathoms must provide their own lights, and we are not quite sure that the fact that they are enabled to do so is not the greatest wonder of all life's mysteries. One can understand the development or the degeneration of a limb or an organ to suit altered conditions of life, just as one can realise a race of Imperial Yeomen growing up with the square and characteristic South African jaw, fitted to cope with biltong and bully-beef. But that the power to make light should be given to these insignificant dwellers of the ocean is indeed wonderful when we recollect that we, with the pro- foundestresearches, only know it as a vibration of ether, and can- not produce it ourselves by natural means. So much is denied to us and given to them that the thoughtful mind must find significance in the distinction. Some deep-sea fishes have rows of lantern-like scales along their sides, and must resemble a Cunarder at night when the saloon passengers are dining. Even your blind fish finds a use for phosphorescence, enlarging the tip of his dorsal-fin ray iilto a little luminous bulb which attracts some prey that can see. Time is of as little value to the "stopper-fisted" hermit-crab who lives in the Andaman Sea as it is to the Persian or the Spaniard ; he is content to wait till a bit of waterlogged bamboo or mangrove sinks to his region of the sea. A certain crab of the Coromandel coast has a sort of file arrangement which he draws across a ridge on the same limb, making a noise as alarming to intruders of his own kind as a policeman's rattle used to be to the burglar.
Dr. Aloock quotes the very general distribution of some species as observed by others. A bivalve of English seas occurs in the Bay of Bengal, and a species found in the Straits of Magellan is identical with another from the Bay of ,BengaL Yet another which occurs on the deep floor of the -Bay and at the bottom of the Atlantic is also dredged from the Laccadive Sea. We may note that Dr. Alcock observed in Ancutta Island (the Laccadives) the same sea-perch living in the fresh-water tanks as in the tidal poo13 of the reefs. He mentions a recently closed lagoon which, gradually becoming fresh, may furnish an interesting experiment. There are many curious discussions with regard to distribution, general and local, which may throw light on the problem of the survival of a marine fauna in Tanganyika.
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