100 YEARS AGO

In “Monkeys; their Affinities and Distribution,” by Dr. A. R. Wallace, the author gives as one of the characters in which man differs from all the monkey tribe — “the perfect freedom of the hands from all part in locomotion.” My object in writing this is to point out the peculiar way in which the majority of people move their arms and hands when walking or running. One may safely say that everybody, adults and children, at one time or another exercise this movement. The natural way in which children run is to “paddle” with the arms and hands, though trained runners do not do so. Now is it not possible that this muscular movement of the fore-limbs in opposite directions in the act of locomotion is a survival of the four-legged mode of progression of man's remote ancestors?... I believe that this theory has been thought of before, but I am unable to find any trace of it in the books I have consulted. I should be very grateful if any of your readers would enlighten me on the subject.

Basil W. Martin

From Nature 28 November 1901.

50 YEARS AGO

The story of the rabbit in Australia is so well known, so familiar an instance of the spread of an innocent introduction to plague dimensions, that fresh turns in its course must be spectacular to become news... The recognition that the virus disease, myxomatosis, might be an agent in reducing rabbit numbers directly invoked scientific enquiry and although early investigations... established that the disease could work, its effectiveness was small because of its very limited powers of spreading naturally through rabbit populations and groups... But as [this report] was prepared, a spectacular development occurred in the development of myxomatosis epidemics. It was known that the disease could be spread from sick to healthy rabbits by certain mosquitoes. As mentioned above, the first attempts to establish the disease in experimental sites were unsuccessful, but by continuing the introduction into warren colonies in the Murray River valley into the summer months of 1950–51, conditions favourable to success were encountered and mosquitoes rapidly spread the disease, so that by February 1951 the disease was reported widely in the Murray River system and its incidence had extended northwards along the MurrumBridgee, the Lachlan and the Darling Rivers, almost up to the Queensland border.

From Nature 1 December 1951.