100 YEARS AGO

Sir Hiram S. Maxim confirms the observation mentioned in our issue of October 17 (p. 607) of the attraction which certain sounds have for mosquitoes. Writing to the Times, he states that one of the electric lamps which he put up at Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1878, emitted a musical note; or rather the note proceeded from the box containing the dynamo machine under the lamp. One evening whilst examining the lamp he found that everything in the immediate vicinity was covered with small insects. They did not appear to be attempting to get into the globe, but into the box that was giving out the musical note. A close examination of these insects showed that they were all male mosquitoes... Sir Hiram Maxim remarks that “when the lamps were started in the beginning of the evening every male mosquito would at once turn in the direction of the lamp, and, as it were, face the music, and then fly off in the direction from which the sound proceeded... as the pitch of the note was almost identical with the buzzing of the female mosquito the male took the music to be the buzzing of the female.”

From Nature 31 October 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

There has been a lively discussion, in Nature and elsewhere, on the classification of recent fossil finds in South Africa. Prof. S. Zuckerman has rightly stressed the need for basing such decisions on statistical tests. But his findings have been at odds with those based on classical comparisons; so that anthropologists must now be in doubt whether their science has, indeed, anything to learn from statistics. This unhappy result can be traced to the piecemeal tests which have hitherto been used. A bone or a tooth is a unit; it is not a discrete assembly of independent measurements. To compare its single variates one by one, as Ashton and Zuckerman have done, is both inconclusive and misleading... The technique of multivariate analysis makes it possible to construct functions to discriminate at one time between a number of species, and we hope elsewhere to construct such functions for human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orang-utan teeth. These functions can, we believe, have an important place in biological classification, for which indeed they were first designed.

From Nature 3 November 1951.