100 YEARS AGO

The sale of Chartley Park, Staffordshire, the hereditary seat of Lord Ferrers, involves also a change of ownership of the remnant of the celebrated herd of white cattle which have been kept there for the last 700 years... It was long considered that the herds of cattle in various British parks were direct descendants of the wild aurochs, but it is now generally admitted (largely owing to the writings of Mr. Lydekker) that they are derived from domesticated albino breeds nearly allied to the Pembroke and other black Welsh strains, some of which show a marked tendency to albinism... The theory advocated by a later writer... that the British park cattle are the descendants of a white sacrificial breed introduced by the Romans rests upon no solid basis. The Chartley cattle, believed to be reduced to nine head, are to be captured by the purchaser — no easy task.

From Nature 8 December 1904.

50 YEARS AGO

The Conquest of Plague. This is a comprehensive study of plague. The author, Dr. L. Fabian Hirst... reminds the reader that primitive beliefs and observations may hold truths that are only revealed to the man of science centuries later. Instances of this are the epidemics of plague among the Philistines, described in the Old Testament (I Samuel, v, vi), which are associated with the presence of small rodents. The Hebrew word akbar may mean rat or mouse. If the civic authorities of London had read their Bible more carefully, they would not have favoured the rat population in ordering the destruction of cats and dogs as possible vectors of plague in 1665. Dr. Charles Singer has pointed out that during the seventeenth century natural causes were first assigned to plague, and even that it was due to the multiplication of minute organisms, a hypothesis not verified for two hundred years... On the vexed question as to whether Kitasato or Yersin discovered the bacillus of plague at Hong Kong in 1894, Dr. Hirst examines the evidence and states (p. 108): “The conclusion must be that both bacteriologists discovered the plague bacillus within a few days. Kitasato saw it first, but Yersin, the former preparateur of the Pasteur Institute, was probably the more accomplished technician and gave by far the best description of the micro-organism”.

From Nature 11 December 1954.