Marine Natural Products from Indonesian Waters

Natural products are primal and have been a driver in the evolution of organic chemistry and ultimately in science. The chemical structures obtained from marine organisms are diverse, reflecting biodiversity of genes, species and ecosystems. Biodiversity is an extraordinary feature of life and provides benefits to humanity while promoting the importance of environment conservation. This review covers the literature on marine natural products (MNPs) discovered in Indonesian waters published from January 1970 to December 2017, and includes 732 original MNPs, 4 structures isolated for the first time but known to be synthetic entities, 34 structural revisions, 9 artifacts, and 4 proposed MNPs. Indonesian MNPs were found in 270 papers from 94 species, 106 genera, 64 families, 32 orders, 14 classes, 10 phyla, and 5 kingdoms. The emphasis is placed on the structures of organic molecules (original and revised), relevant biological activities, structure elucidation, chemical ecology aspects, biosynthesis, and bioorganic studies. Through the synthesis of past and future data, huge and partly undescribed biodiversity of marine tropical invertebrates and their importance for crucial societal benefits should greatly be appreciated.

The observed decline of Western Toads (Anaxyrus boreas) over several decades at a novel winter breeding site

The Western Toad (Anaxyrus boreas) population of the Atlin Warm Springs in northwestern British Columbia has persisted since at least 1924. An extraordinary feature of the population has been winter breeding in late February to early March, while nearby cold-water populations breed in late-May. Metamorphosis of tadpoles, enhanced by the warm water, occurs as early as late-March. In 2008, Amphibian Chytrid Fungus (Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis) was documented in toadlets at the warm springs. Until 2005, as many as eight egg clutches and 25 breeding adults had been observed at the warm springs, after which the population declined. In 2017, novel spring breeding occurred in a cooler pond in the spring complex. Future observations will help determine whether the population is recovering and whether breeding phenology and habitat use have changed.

Can a museum explain imperialism?

Empires produced some of the ancient world's grandest monuments. No doubt that helps to account for successive major exhibitions recently mounted at the British Museum.The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Armyclosed in April 2008, having drawn more visitors than any other sinceTreasures of Tutankhamunin 1972 (British Museum 2008: 66). There followed, from July to October, impressive and intriguing pieces on Hadrian, the Roman Emperor of the second century AD. The attention to large political systems is timely (James 2008: 201). Twenty-five years ago, Donald Horne (1984: 252) went so far as to declare that 'in the popularisations … of the huge storehouse of … artifacts … that are such an extraordinary feature of our age. … we may find the only real potential for giving substance to human liberation'. Is this feasible in practice; and, if so, is a state museum with business sponsorship a likely place to find such enlightenment? Studying the archaeology inHadrian, withThe First Emperoras a foil, enabled us to assess these questions.

White Power in South Africa: Cohesion without Consensus?

THAT SOUTH AFRICA HAS WITHIN ITS STATE AND SOCIETY THE POTENTIAL for revolution is rarely doubted. It is a very strange and wicked country — anachronistic and atavistic, as if left over from the past to trouble the present. Africans are not worse treated today in South Africa than black men and women were in the United States 150 years ago. They are not bought and sold as property. Their survival, too, is assured unlike, say, the American Indians or the Aborigines of Australia at the turn of the century. They are more free, or less 'unfree', than the serfs in Russia before emancipation. But the extraordinary feature of South Africa is that it is still bound to a rigidly divided society which, if it is not slavery, is certainly close to serfdom. To behave in the twentieth century in a modern industrial state as if it were still the nineteenth or eighteenth century is very unusual, so unusual in fact that many people simply refuse to believe that it can be done: the whites deny that the parallel is just, the non-white populations refuse to believe it can last. It is this conflict of belief as well as the opposition of interests which seem to presage tragedy, for, if revolution comes, it will certainly be tragic not only for those who fear its consequences but for many who now want to hasten its arrival. Very often in such terrible situations, it seems to me that there is also an element of fatalism. It comes to be believed that what must be, will be, although whether that point has yet been reached in South Africa I do not know. It is something we have to consider.

XXI.—On some Ancient Modes of Trial, especially those in which Appeal was made to the Divine Judgment through the Ordeals of Water, Fire, and other Judicia Dei. By William Sidney Gibson, Esq. F.S.A., Barrister-at-Law

It will be readily admitted that few objects of archæological research are better deserving of our attention than those which illustrate the jurisprudential system of our ancestors, and the history of our venerable laws.A most extraordinary feature of the judicial code of ancient times was the practice of the Ordeal Trials, in which the solemnities of religion were united with the administration of secular justice, and a mode of divination resorted to for the discovery of hidden truth; and since those modes of trial were for many ages a part of English law and usage in the trial of criminal causes, though now (perhaps happily) they are matter of history alone, the author proposes in the present discourse to put together as concisely as he can the information and examples he has collected in elucidation of the origin and practice of the Ordeal Trials, and to invite references to any judicial records which may further illustrate the subject.