Canto V. Convinced that the story of the prince is true, Sultan

Mengindra dissuades him from returning, but bids his minister write a missive in letters of gold and dispatch it at once, with presents and jewels, to the King of Kambayat.

In Canto VI we have the last chapter. The King of Kambayat receives the letter, which, however, makes no mention of Bidasari, and at once accompanies the messengers to Sultan Mengindra's court. He makes his entry into the strange capital with becoming splendor, and is received with great honor. The queen now makes herself known to her father, who is moved to tears. Banquets and great tournaments follow, and happiness pervades the court. The king returns after a time to his own land, but continues as long as he lives to send gifts and goods to his daughter and her royal lord.

THE COLORS OF FLOWERS.

BY HENRI COUPIN.

Much might be said, from an artistic and poetic point of view, concerning the colors of flowers. It is in the corolla that they reveal themselves in their most minute delicacy. The tints so widely diffused among animals, even those of butterflies, are coarse as compared with them, and the painter's palette is powerless to reproduce them. They run through the whole gamut of the solar spectrum, even to its most minute details. Some naturalists have striven to establish a classification of them, and it will be convenient to be acquainted with their efforts, though they are not decisive and are somewhat artificial, like all classifications. We give one of the most ingenious of them:

GREEN. { Greenish-blue. | Yellow-green. } { Blue. | Yellow. } Cyanic series. { Blue-violet. | Yellow-orange. } Xanthic series. { Violet. | Orange. } { Violet-red. | Orange-red. } RED.

The type of the cyanic series is blue, and that of the xanthic series yellow. The first is sometimes denominated the deoxidized series, and the second the oxidized, but these designations have hardly solid enough foundations to be preserved. De Candolle, who publishes the table in his Vegetable Physiology, appends some interesting remarks to it.

It will be noticed by the inspection of the table that nearly all the flowers susceptible of changes of color, as a rule, simply go up or down the scale of shades of the series to which they belong. Thus, in the xanthic series the flowers of the _Nyctago jalapa_ may be yellow, yellow-orange, or red; those of _Rosa eglantina_ yellow-orange or orange-red; those of nasturtium from yellow to orange; the flowers of _Ranunculus asiaticus_ present all the colors of red up to green; those of the _Hieracium staticefolium_, and of some other yellow _Chicoraceæ_ and of some _Leguminosæ_ like the lotus, become greenish-yellow when dried, etc. In the cyanic series the flowers of many _Boraginaceæ_, especially of _Lithospermum purpureo-cæruleum_, vary from blue to violet-red; those of hortensia from rose to blue; the ligulate flowers of the asters from blue to red or violet; those of the hyacinths from blue to red, etc.

There are, however, a few apparent exceptions to this rule. Thus, although the hyacinths usually vary only in the blues, reds, or white, yellowish varieties, indicating an approach to the xanthic series, are sometimes found in gardens. The auricula, which is originally yellow, passes to reddish-brown, to green, and to a sort of violet, but never reaches pure blue; and single petals occasionally give suggestions of both series in distinct parts of their surfaces.

Some surprise may be felt that white does not figure in De Candolle's table. This is because an absolutely white color does not seem to exist in any flower. The fact may be shown by placing some flowers supposed to be of the purest white, like the lily, the white campanula, or the wood anemone, on a leaf of clear white paper. It will be found that the white of the corolla is really washed with yellow, blue, or orange, according to what flower is taken. If the tint does not appear distinct, infusions of the corollas in alcohol will present tones unmistakably yellow or red, etc. White flowers are therefore flowers with tints appertaining to one of De Candolle's series, but albinized, as if they were etiolated. A small number of flowers begin white, and are subsequently colored under the action of light. The _Cheiranthus chameleo_ passes from white to citron-yellow and a slightly violet-red; the _Ænothera tetraptera_, at first white, becomes rose and then almost red; the petals of the Indian tamarind are white the first day and yellow the second; and the corolla of the _Cobea scandens_ comes out greenish-white and turns to violet the second day. The most remarkable plant in this respect is _Hibiscus mutabilis_, which Rumph calls the hourly flower, because it starts white, turns flesh-color toward noon, and becomes red at sunset.

In his recent work on Plants and their Cosmic Media, M. Costantin has some remarks concerning the precocity of various races and the tint of their flowers. Hoffmann made observations on this point for several years. He remarked, as the result of eight years' observation, that the common lilac with white flowers blooms on an average six days earlier than the normal form with purple flowers. This might be a curious anomaly with no bearing, but the more we advance in the study of Nature the more we perceive that all phenomena, even the most insignificant, deserve to be examined. Similar results have been observed in varieties of radish (_Raphanus raphanistrum_) and of saffron (_Crocus vernus_); in the former the white flowers expand on an average of sixteen days earlier than the yellow ones (twelve years of observation), and in the latter plant the difference is four days.

These changes of tint sometimes appear to depend on the temperature. Thus, the white lilac was obtained by horticulturists under the influence of a temperature of between 30° and 35° C. We can not, however, affirm that spontaneous races with white flowers originated in the same way as the white lilac. It will be enough to point out a few facts that may contribute to the guidance of persons who are seeking to learn the origin of these colored varieties. The _Papava alpinum_ has a very stable variety with yellow flowers, which, according to Focke, has been observed in the polar regions, while the white varieties have been seen in Switzerland. The cultivation of the same species at Giessen, Germany, has made it possible to obtain specimens with white flowers by metamorphosis from specimens with yellow flowers, but it is impossible to say whether or not heat is the agent that produces the changes in these cases. The experiments of MM. Schübela and Bonnier have shown that flowers become darker without changing their color in high regions and in those near the pole; but this phenomenon is one of light and not of color. Be their origin what it may, these white and colored forms have remarkable fixedness.

It will be observed that black does not figure in the table of the classification of colors given above. Absolute black, in fact, does not exist in any flower. If some parts appear black, it is only because their tint is excessively dark. The black of the petals of _Pelargonium triste_ and of the bean is yellow, and that of the _Orchis nigra_ is a brown. Apparent blacks are, moreover, extremely rare.

The gamut of the reds is much more varied than that of other colors. The reds of the xanthic series are generally more lively-hued, carnation or flame-colored; those of the cyanic series present tints more nearly approaching violet. These two reds may furthermore give rose-colors, but a little skill will divine their origin. The rose of the hydrangea inclines to blue, while that of the rose tends rather toward yellow. Blue colors are the most variable, and readily pass to violet and red, but most frequently to white. The most tenacious hues are those of yellow, and we might affirm that the bright and glistening yellow of the buttercup may be said never to change. The paler yellows change more easily, but rarely pass to anything but white. Green flowers, not being readily distinguished from the foliage around them, need not be specially mentioned. They are believed to be much rarer than they really are.

Horticulturists are able, by cultivation, selection, and hybridization, to cause the colors of flowers to vary in considerable proportions. Not much is known of the laws of these variations, chiefly because gardeners who might tell botanists of them if they would have not the scientific spirit. We cite here what MM. Decaisne and Naudin[7] say respecting the variations of the color of flowers:

[Footnote 7: Manuel de l'amateur des jardins.]

"Change in this respect is effected in two ways: sometimes there is a simple discoloration, drawing the red, yellow, or blue tints of the corolla toward a more or less pure white; sometimes there is a radical substitution of one color for another. Flowers in which red or blue are the dominant tints are most subject to turn white, but the change may also be observed on some flowers that are naturally yellow, such as the disk of the daisy, the dahlia, and the chrysanthemum when those flowers suffer ligular transformation. Nothing, on the other hand, is more common in our gardens than white varieties of pink or of red roses, lilac, scarlet runners, larkspur, purple digitalis, Canterbury bells, etc.--in fact, nearly all plants with lilac, rose, red, purple, blue, or violet flowers. There are some flowers, however, in these categories the coloration of which is very persistent, and rarely fades perceptibly--as may be seen in the purple petunias, the hue of which does not lose its vivacity even when it is crossed with the white variety.

"The radical substitution of one color for another, whether over the whole corolla or only on some of its parts, in the form of spots, stripes, or variegations, is also of frequent occurrence, and is one of the sorts of modifications which horticulturists have used with great advantage. A considerable number of 'fancy' plants derive almost all their importance from the facility with which the liveliest colors replace one another, blend, and intermix in a thousand ways and in relative proportions of which nothing is fixed, so that we can not find in these collections, when they are well chosen, two plants out of a hundred that are exactly alike in the tone and distribution of their colors. These multicolored varieties, all the offspring of cultivation, are generally perpetuated true by cuttings, while the seedlings compensate for the uncertainty of what they will produce by the certainty that they will give rise to new combinations of colors. This is not the case with single-colored varieties, which, unless they are crossed with others, tend to perpetuate themselves through their seedlings. The yellow, white, and purple varieties of the four-o'clock, for example, when they are pure, reproduce themselves constantly; when crossed with one another they give rise to intermediately colored flowers, and more frequently to variegated ones."

Mr. Hughes Gibb observed, in the mild winter of 1897-'98, that flowers blooming out of season were liable not to have the same color as regularly blooming ones.

The cactus dahlia, usually red, has put out flowers almost orange and with exterior florets sometimes nearly yellow. On the other hand, these dahlias have often shown a marked tendency to return to the simpler form.

A species of nasturtium, habitually of a bright scarlet-red, has given in the cold frame late flowers of a bright yellow, a red band near the center of the petals remaining the only vestige of the normal color. In both cases the change of color began on the edges of the petals. The flower of the myosotis, normally bright blue, has become almost clear rose, without the slightest trace of blue; and a pure blue phlox has shown a tendency toward greenish-yellow.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from La Nature._

FOLKLORE OF THE ALLEGHANIES.

BY FRANCES ALBERT DOUGHTY.

The West Virginia mountaineer lives very close to Nature, and viewed from many standpoints the relation is characterized by pleasing amenities: juicy berries refresh him along the road; nuts drop into his path; "sang" (ginseng), which makes one of his sources of revenue, reveals itself to his eye as he follows the cows to pasture; a cool brook springs up to quench his thirst when weary of following the plow; pine knots are always within reach to make light as well as warmth; mud and stones easily combine in his hand to shape a daub chimney; and a trough dug out of an old tree furnishes a receptacle that is as good for dough at one end as for a baby at the other.

Often, however, this close relation to Nature assumes a war attitude, fierce and uncompromising. If hungry wolves no longer howl furiously at the back fence after nightfall, or gnaw at the log pens which secure the stock, and if panthers are seldom bold enough to spring at a horse's flanks as a man rides along in the daytime, bears are still numerous enough to devour a large number of sheep every year in spite of precautions, and they have a pronounced taste for sweet young corn. The living wrested from the soil in the short and changeable summer months must cover the winter's need as well; it is generally so scant and uncertain that the mountaineer feels a chronic discouragement toward agriculture as a pursuit and resource. He must depend on it, and yet as far back as he or his father can remember there has always been some reason why "a good crop" could not be made that year. The West Virginian lives in a large and thinly settled game preserve, but the fleet deer usually contrives to escape the hunter's chill wait in the autumnal dawn, the coy wild turkey is overshy of his lure, and the wary trout requires a very patient rod. In the long winter deep snows cover the fences, groups or "bunches" of cows and sheep often perish in the drifts, and the human prisoners in their cabins, huddling around the wood fires, are nearly always, as they express it, "short of" some article which would be considered a necessity in the average city home.

The varying, defiant, and incalculable moods and phases of Nature bring so many chances into the humble lot of the mountaineer that it is not surprising he should interpret her phenomena as having a distinctly personal import. Anciently, around Olympus the talk was of "omens," "auguries," and "fate"; dwellers along the chain of the Alleghanies to-day talk of "signs," "spells," and "luck," and these words held their significance for hundreds of years in the ancestral stock of the first settlers in the region, most of the folklore being directly traceable to a Scotch-Irish strain of blood. The mountain pattern taken far from cities probably differs little either mentally or physically from that of the colonial mountaineers. Even with the railroad traversing a limited area, and the influx of summer visitors during three months of the year, the only perceptible change wrought in the natives is a little sharpening of their wits from the barter of fruit and furs at the hotels in the extensive mineral-spring section. The Alleghany mountaineer, ignorant, narrow-minded, honest, brave, and hospitable, remains what he was when the eagle soared from the inaccessible eyrie above his head to be chosen as the tutelary genius of the unconquerable young republic. The chief distinction in the temperament of the sexes is that the men are frank and talkative, the women shy and uncommunicative. Beings approaching the legendary fauns and satyrs, clad in the skins of wild animals, are sometimes discovered by the solitary horseman in the wild mountain fastnesses; they gaze at him as an apparition from a strange world, never having seen a village or heard a railroad whistle.

There is a curious and persistent survival of the belief in witchcraft through this mineral-spring belt in West Virginia. To draw out the natives on this mysterious subject they must be approached sympathetically; if twitted with their credulity they will shut up like clams, for with all the simplicity of the unlettered their intuition often arrives at a correct understanding of the estimate placed upon them by more fortunate persons. When satisfied that he is not expected to pose as a "freak," but is met on the equal plane of human intercourse, the mountain story-teller seems to enjoy recounting the traditions and beliefs of his people and their forefathers. Leaving himself a loophole of escape, he is very likely to finish his yarn with--

"'Tain't that I believe them things myself. I know they ain't nawthin' but superstition; but I kin qualify that right round here, not many miles away, there's people that believes in witches."

In a little cottage on a much-traveled thoroughfare one woman admitted to me with bated breath, as though not quite sure her tormentor was dead, that she had been bewitched. Her account was given in these words:

"I kep' seein' an old woman with a cow's hoof in her hand; sometimes she was by my side an' sometimes she was there on the wall. At last she come up close to me, an' she was goin' to clap the cow's hoof over my mouth, but I slapped at her right hard an' she went away. She ain't never come again. Yes, I _know_ I was bewitched."

A cow's hoof is a frequent accessory, and animals that are brought into the magic circle are always of a domestic character, completely subservient to the power of the witch.

It is noticeable that the exercise of witchcraft is generally ascribed to women; and that of witch mastery, the superior attribute, to men.

The form of a judicial process found favor with the Puritan temperament in old Salem, although by a grim mockery the verdict was decided in advance. The independent mountaineer likes to take the law in his own hands, as the following story illustrates:

"A farmer believed a woman was bewitching his stock. He drew a picture of her and set it up as a target; then he sunk a piece of silver in his bullet with an awl, _that being the charm for shooting a witch_. He aimed to shoot the picture through the heart, but fired a little too low. On that very day the woman herself fell flat on the ground, and a deep, awful hole was found in her side. From that minute she suffered extreme agony, and died in a week."

The narrator had heard this grewsome tale from his grandmother, who said that she had seen the hole.

One of the oldest inhabitants of Monroe County is responsible for the ensuing chronicle; he dates it in the "forties" of the present century:

"'Tain't so very long ago there was a woman livin' near the Sweet Springs who used to be always seen with a cap and bonnet on; nobody ever saw her without the cap. She was a hard, grim-lookin' monster. If anybody was watchin' to see her ontie her cap strings, somehow they never could see any more until the clean cap was on--now that's _so_, there ain't any mistake about that! When she come over here from Botetourt County the report followed her that she lived pretty close to a man whose chillun went to school, an' a calf had been in the habit of attackin' 'em an' bitin' em. The father concealed himself one day and was watchin' to catch the calf. On that occasion it come out an' attacked the chillun on a bridge across a little stream o' water. He ran and caught the calf and cut off his ears with a knife. They always believed that _the old witch had turned herself into that calf_, and so when she turned back into a woman she wore the cap to hide that she didn't have any ears. There was three sisters of 'em; it was reported they was all witches, possessed of some uncommon art. John and Harriet had two little pet pullets they thought a good deal of. The cap-woman wanted 'em; they just fluttered an' fluttered till they died. Her name was Nancy L----. Well, she wanted the carpenter to make her a piece of furniture out of an old dirty plank she had, an' he wouldn't do it. He said it was gritty and it would ruin his tools. Then she got mad and said, 'I'll make you suffer in the flesh for that!' One day soon after that he was at his hog pen feedin' the hogs, when suddenly he was struck down perfectly helpless, so he couldn't speak. He thought it was paralytic or rheumatism. In those days there was an old doctor in Staunton, Augusta County, who had a kind o' process to steam people and boil 'em in a big kettle, for rheumatism. He put sump'n fireproof, a paste or ointment, all over 'em, like the fireproof you put on buildings, an' boiled 'em an hour or two hours, as the case might be. The carpenter went to consult him, an' he put him in a kettle that was big enough for him either to stand or sit down in it; a collar was fitted tight round his neck so the hot water couldn't get into his face and eyes. The boilin' didn't seem to do him any good. When he got home he halted about for twelve months or more. First he felt a pain in his hip, and then he felt a pain by the side of his knee as if it was gradually workin' down; then one day there was sump'n jaggin' in the calf of his leg. He put his leg up on a bench and an old gentleman seen sump'n stickin' out. He took a pair of nippers an' ketched holt an' pulled out a big shirtin' needle. Hugh kept the needle as long as he lived, and he believed Nancy the old witch shot him with it. He halted on that leg the balance of his days. _I've seen the needle_; it's God's truth!"

A spice of profanity seems to have the virtue of embalming a witch story in the mountain memory. A rustic maiden who lives with her family on one of the loneliest hilltops in the Alleghanies, only to be reached on foot or horseback, makes this contribution to the folklore of the region:

"An old lady not far off had three daughters, and she was going to learn 'em to be witches. They had to sit on the hearth by the fire and take off their shoes and grease their heels so as to go up the chimney, and they were not allowed to speak. The mother was to go first and the girls were to follow. The old lady and the two foremost ones had all got up safe, but the last girl, when she was in a narrow place in the chimney, said, 'This is a d--d tight squeeze!' With that she fell back and was burned up."

The value of silence and self-control appears to be the only touch of morality in the witch logic. Manifestations of the black art frequently take place by or over running water. These characteristics are observed in another story from the same maid of the mountain:

"Two witches were going to rob a store in the night, and they took a young man with them as a partner. They put the greased witch cap on his head so he could go through the keyhole. They all started out, and presently they came to a river. They saw some calves in a field, and caught three of 'em; they mounted the two that were heifers and the boy got on the steer calf. They charged him of all things not to speak on the journey. The witches jumped the river on their calves without makin' a sound, but just as he was jumping across he cried out, 'That was a d--d good jump for a steer calf!' Well, they all went on, and when they got to the store they passed through the keyhole one after another, the young man too. They took all the money they wanted, but when the time came to leave he couldn't get out of the keyhole, because he had spoken, and the spell was broken. He was found in the store the next morning, and had to take all the punishment."

It is interesting to note as an offset to all these diabolic attributes and potencies that a firm faith exists in a beneficent Power back of them which under given conditions will prevail over evil. "God is always stronger than the devil" is the mountain way of expressing this dependence, and there are charlatans who take advantage of it by going about as "witch masters." One of these died a few years ago, and another farther back, an Irishman named "Mosey," is quoted yet for his successes as "master of all the witches and all the devils."

When the cows had been eating mushrooms and their milk became too bitter to make good butter, Mosey was sent for at once to "cure the witchcraft" and "take off the spell." He took his regular beat through his part of the mountain country once in a while. An old man who oscillates between the "White" and the "Sweet," selling canes, remembers him well. He tells of one woman's experience who "filed a complaint" that her cow wouldn't give much milk, and that the milk wouldn't "gether" for butter.

"'Woman,' says Mosey, 'your cow's bewitched, and badly bewitched!'

"'Can you do anything for her, Mosey, and what will you charge?'

"'Yes, I can cure her if you'll pay me five dollars and give me five pounds of butter to take home with me to burn in the fire to cap the climax and burn out the spell.'

"Then he want through his enchantments over the cow, and took the money and the butter home with him. One day when he had been drinking a little I asked him if he really burned all that butter. 'Divil a grain of it did I burn; I ate it with my pertaties.' It was on that same trip when Mosey was curin' the cow that a man who lived near by sent for him. 'I feel mighty quare, Mosey,' says he, 'an' I can't describe exactly how I do feel!' 'You're bewitched, sir,' says he, 'and badly bewitched!' (he always used those words). 'Faith, an' I'll try and cure ye! Have ye got any blue yarn about the house?' The man's wife went to look for some, and she came back with a hank of blue yarn. Mosey wound off enough of it to make a cord about the size of his finger; they twisted it together, he pretending to put some enchantments on it, and then he told the sick man to fasten it round his waist next to his skin. 'Don't you lose it on peril of your life,' says he, 'or you're a dead man!' 'Peggy, get a needle and sew it on me!' he says to his wife, an' she done it. He gradually got well--may be he'd a got well anyway. I can't vouch for that."

When asked if such things were still happening, the cane-seller replied:

"Not three weeks ago a woman thought her cow was bewitched because her butter wouldn't gather, and she het an old horseshoe hot and dropped it in the churn of milk. When she churned again the butter on that occasion gathered, and _it was the same milk_ that was in the churn to burn the witch. You can put that down for June, '93."

The Potts Creek neighborhood is said to be a center for the witch superstition. It is also a favorite place for "bush meetings," to which the natives come from a distance in their wagons with picnic dinners of salt-risen corn pone and sliced bacon, and there they listen approvingly to fervid exhortations that are based on orthodox Baptist and Methodist doctrines. The West Virginia mountaineer is profoundly religious in temperament, and considers that he has scriptural ground for a belief in witchcraft.

* * * * *

PROF. H. E. ARMSTRONG has described how, by taking incidents from suitable story books, children aged respectively seven and a half, ten, and twelve and a half years were set to work to test the physical facts mentioned, and how, by the systematic use of the balance, measuring instruments, and simple apparatus, or even household utensils, a true spirit of scientific research was engendered. Evidence of the good effect was exhibited in the notebooks made by the children, which demonstrate clearly how well the juvenile investigators have mastered the scientific method of observation.

ORIGIN OF ANCIENT HINDU ASTRONOMY.

BY THE COUNT GOBLET D'ALVIELLA.

It is manifest that India is indebted for some of its astronomy to the Greeks. Not that it had not astronomy and astronomers from an epoch anterior to the invasion of Alexander. It had, in fact, been necessary to make observations of the heavens in order to fix a calendar that would enable the sacrifices of the Vedic ritual in connection with the return of the seasons and the revolutions of the stars to be celebrated at the right dates. Further, the belief in astrology, or the influence exercised by the movements of the planets on physical phenomena and all the events of human life, would lead, in India as elsewhere, to the observation and anticipation of everything relating to the conjunction and opposition of the heavenly bodies.

The Rig-Veda has allusions to the phases and stations of the moon. The stations (_nakshatras_) consisted, according to a tradition preserved by the Brahmans, of twenty-seven constellations (afterward twenty-eight) which the moon was supposed to traverse successively in the course of its sidereal revolution. A lunar zodiac and a primary division of time into months were thus obtained. The moon, moreover, bears in the Veda the name of month-maker (_mâsakrit_). Each station was assigned a uniform length of 13° 20' on the ecliptic, and a denomination, generally derived from mythology. The month, in turn, took its name from the constellation that had the honor of harboring the moon. Manon and the Djyotisha (a special treatise included among the Védângas, or commentaries on the Vedas) tell us that the year was composed of twelve months, the month of thirty days, the day of thirty hours, the hour of forty-eight minutes, all strictly sexagesimal subdivisions, like our own measures of time. The Djyotisha also teaches the art of constructing a clepsydra, or water-clock.

The adjustment of the solar year to correspond with the lunar year and of the two with the civil year dates from this period. The month was still composed of thirty days, but the solar years were grouped into quinquennial periods, in the middle and at the end of which the lunar month was doubled. Combining these quinquennial periods with the revolutions of the planet _Brihaspati_ (Jupiter), which was calculated as occupying about twelve years, the Indian astronomers computed an astronomical cycle of sixty solar years. As the same cycle is found with the Chaldeans, where, according to Berosus, it was called the _Sossos_, we have to inquire how far Brahmanic astronomy was influenced by the systems which were originally formed in ancient Chaldea. The presumption of such an influence furnishes a simpler and more probable hypothesis than the effort to trace the earliest astronomical ideas of the Hindus, as M. W. Brennand has recently suggested, to a period when the ancestors of the Aryans, the Semites, and the Chinese were wandering together over the plateaus of central Asia!

We know now, from the cuneiform inscriptions, that the Chaldeans had, at a period far anterior to the entrance of the Aryans into India, invented a double calendar, solar and lunar, with intercalary periods; discovered the proper motion of the planets; calculated the return of eclipses; and constituted a double metrical system, decimal and sexagesimal; and, as was done, too, in India, had divided the circumference into three hundred and sixty degrees of sixty minutes each. It is impossible to draw the lines exactly between the astronomical discoveries which the Hindus borrowed from abroad and those which they drew from their own resources prior to the invasion of the Greeks, but we need in no case go farther than Mesopotamia for the source of the borrowed data.

The ancient literature of India contains observations of the positions or conjunctions of some of the stars that carry us back to positive dates in the history of the sky. The astronomers Bailly, Colebrooke, and Bentley, and, more recently, M. Brennand, have found notes relative to astronomical phenomena that took place in the twelfth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and even the twenty-first centuries B. C. Max Müller, however, advises prudence and reserve in accepting these calculations, some of which may have been afterthoughts, and others offer only apparent agreements.

In any case, the advent of Buddhism, by depreciating the religious practices and astrological speculations of the Brahmans, contributed to bringing on a decline of astronomy at the very time it was taking its most vigorous stand among the Greeks. We learn from a passage in Strabo that the Pramnai regarded the Brahmans as boasters and mad because they were interested in physiology and astronomy. Now, there really exists an ancient Buddhist treatise in which the predictions by the Brahmans of eclipses of the sun and of the conjunctions and oppositions of the planets, and their discussions of the appearance of comets and meteors, are treated as despicable arts and lies.

It was just at this age that Hellenic culture was developed in northwest India. It held astronomy, and astrology too, in great esteem. The Milinda Panda mentions the royal astrologer as one of the principal functionaries of Menander. No doubt there were, among the Gavanas (Ionians) of Taxila and Euthydêmia, minds versed in the knowledge of the principal cosmological systems formulated among the Greeks from Thales to Aristotle, and also acquainted with all the progress in the physical and mathematical sciences that had been achieved by the Alexandrian astronomers in the last centuries before Christ. To comprehend the extent of the influence of Hellenic science, we have only to inquire what Hindu astronomy had become again at the time of the restoration of the Brahmans in the sixth century A. D. Aryabhatta teaches the rotation of the earth around its axis; maintains that the moon, naturally dark, owes its light to the rays of the sun; formulates the true theory of eclipses; assigns an elliptical form to the planetary epicycles; and demonstrates the displacement of the equinoctial and solstitial points. Varâha-Mihira devotes himself especially to astrological labors, but also has the merit of having condensed into a vast encyclopædia the _Pantcha Siddhântikâ_, the principal astronomical treatises that were current in India. And Brahmazoupta is especially famous for his revision of an older treatise, the _Brahma Siddhânta_.

In the opinion of the most competent critics, these works, which are chiefly empirical methods of determining the positions of the stars, are inferior to those which the Alexandrians have left us. Yet, in matters relating to the measurement of arcs and to spherical trigonometry, they reveal a more advanced state of the science. It is impossible to determine at what period this new astronomical science was constituted in India. Some of its theories squarely betray their indebtedness to Greek science, as, for instance, that of the displacement of the equinoctial and solstitial points by a periodical vibration or tremor. We can also say as much of the solar zodiac, the names of the constellations of which strikingly resemble the Greek names in form as well as in significance, and the same of the names of the chief planets. Other expressions are found, notably in the works of Varâha-Mihira, which indicate, if not a borrowing, a contact, at least, with the works of the Greek astronomy, of which Mr. Burgess gives a fairly complete list in his Notes on Hindu Astronomy and the History of our Knowledge of it, in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Among these terms, some are Greek words which have been utilized in naming constellations or astronomical measures; others have retained the special significations which they had in the works of the Alexandrian astronomers. It would certainly be an exaggeration to insist that the adoption of a foreign term of necessity implies the borrowing of the idea which it expresses. It is, nevertheless, probable that the Sanskrit writers would not have made use of so many of these exotic denominations if the ideas they represent had already found their expression in the languages of India.

Further, among the fine Siddântas which Varâha-Mihira collected and condensed as including all the astronomical science of his time, there are two, the _Romaka_ and the _Pauliça_, the names of which suggest directly--the first the scientific culture of the Roman world, and the other Paulus, a celebrated Alexandrian astronomer of the third century A. D.[8]

[Footnote 8: The Romaka Siddânta employs, as a measure of time, the _Guga_ of 2,850 years or 1,040,953 days, giving a tropical year of 365 days, 5 hours, 55 minutes, and 12 seconds, which is exactly the figure proposed by Ptolemy and Hipparchus.--_Burgess, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society._]

We apparently find, likewise, the names of Manetho (fourth century A. D.) in _Manittha_ or _Manimda_; of Spensippus in _Sporedjivadja_; and of Ptolemy in _Asoura Maya_, whom the _Sounya Siddhânta_ designates as the founder of astronomy, and who another treatise says was born at Romakapouri, "the city of the Romans."

In this order of ideas the natives of India have never tried to deny their sources. The Gavanas, we read in the _Gargí Samhitâ_, are barbarians; but this science (astrology) has been constituted by them, and they must be revered as saints. M. Weber affirms that a treatise on astrology bearing their name, the _Gavana Çastra_, was reputed to have been written in the land of the Gavanas by the god Sourya in person, when, expelled from heaven by the resentment of his divine rivals, he came down and was born again in the city of the Romans.[9]

[Footnote 9: The term Romakapouri does not necessarily imply the city of Rome; the name was probably extended to Alexandria and perhaps also to Byzantium. In other writings we find the name Gavanapouri, the city of the Greeks (or Ionians), applied to Alexandria.]

We find, further, that the Greek calendar appears to have survived Hellenic domination in northern India. General Cunningham, in 1862, read in the inscriptions of the Indo-Scythians the names of the Macedonian months Artemisios and Appellaios. Since then the names of two other months of that calendar--Panemos and Daisios--have been found in inscriptions in the Kharosthis character.

Another era of Grecian origin, that of the Seleucidæ, seems likewise to have furnished the Hindus their first historical computation.[10] It should be observed, in fact, that their most ancient era, that of the Mauryas, dates from the year 312 B. C., or the beginning of the era of the Seleucidæ. This had been adopted by the Grecian sovereigns of India, as is attested by a coin of Plato, struck in the year 166 B. C.

[Footnote 10: Till then, the Hindus hardly seem to have sought for a common measure of time except for astronomical or mythological purposes.]

Beginning with the Indo-Scythians, India generally adopted the era of the Cakas, which began, not, as had been long supposed, with the expulsion of the Scythians, but with the coronation of their principal sovereign, Kanichka.[11] Nevertheless, the inscriptions offer still other historical computations, as, for instance, that of the Gouptas era, which began in the year 240 of the Çaka era, and that of Vikramâditya, which was made to begin retrospectively fifty-six years B. C. Hence arise complications of a nature to make the task of paleography and history no lighter.--_Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from Ciel et Terre (from the author's essays on Classical Influences on the Scientific and Literary Culture of India)._

[Footnote 11: M. Sylvain Levi has, however, lately reopened the question of the initial date of this era.]

SKETCH OF WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS.

The old problem of Nature _versus_ nurture that meets us in studying the life history of any organism becomes especially interesting in dealing with the biography of men of eminence. Are their achievements the inevitable expression of the natural forces innate in them at birth, or the product of environmental influences, or some resultant of these two factors? And how much may we in each case assign to one factor or to the other?

These difficult questions naturally suggest themselves in glancing at the life of the subject of this sketch. Like so many men who have won prominence in comparatively new countries, he seemed, in an environment that had no apparent relation to his future, to grow from innate tendencies toward something not suggested by the circumstances about him, even to grow in opposition to the molding influences of these, and to conquer them. Later, however, we find him surrounded by influences that made a particular mode of self-expression easy, if they may not be said to have forced such expression. It was then that the casual observer might say that the circumstances made the man; yet, looking backward, we can trace the initiative in the man that led him into the congenial environment. A selection of proper environment to express Nature has been rightly claimed as a potent factor in all organic life; nurture, then, comes as a secondary power to mold, or rather to translate, the inherent power.

WILLIAM KEITH BROOKS, the second son of Oliver Allen Brooks and Eleanora Bradbury, daughter of the Rev. Phineas Kingsley, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1848. In 1877 he married Amelia Katherine, daughter of Edward T. Schultz and Susan Rebecca, daughter of David L. Martin. He has two children.

Brooks grew up amid the stimulating influences of a relatively new country, where freedom of development was not so sharply restricted but that all paths of life seemed equally open to one who would work. As a boy he was not one of those precocious naturalists of the common sort whose collecting instincts find expression in the hoarding of dead animals or plants rather than the neater postage stamp; names and authorities, classes and species, neatly arranged mummies, were not his delight. At first there seemed no sign that zoölogy would claim him as a most ardent admirer. Yet he was fond of live things and their ways, and introduced into his home that most delightful microcosm, the fresh-water aquarium (so much neglected in this country), in which he could observe at ease the habits and slow changes of living things when their native haunts were not accessible. Such early interest in the essential wonders of livingness rather than in man's artificial classification of phenomena was thus prophetic of much of his later originality of thought and view.

He has never forgotten how much he owes to the instruction of the earnest and broad-minded teachers in the public schools of Cleveland.

His college life began at Hobart, where two years left a deep impression from an acquaintance with Berkeley's thought, gained in browsing in the library, and long treasured up to produce fruit in philosophic views of maturer years. Then at Williams College, where the notable Natural History Society was sending out its expedition across South America, his love of Nature matured and specialized for two years longer, until he received the A. B. degree in 1870. It was Williams also that later, in 1893, bestowed upon him the LL. D. degree. For him the completion of college life was truly the "commencement" and not the finish of his intellectual training. His strong trend toward pure science and abstract mental life forced him onward into post-graduate work. But this required funds, and America was not Germany; the struggle for existence was not here so intense that one might not win bread in many walks of life without special training, and parents did not need to extend the larval period of support for offspring beyond the completion of college life to gain for them a place in any rank, social or intellectual. Now, a rapidly increasing need for the Ph. D. degree as entrance to professional life, necessitating several years of post-graduate study, often forces parents to take up their share in the increased burden. Then, however, few were agreed as to the advisability of prolonging an unpractical life devoted to study beyond what seemed the maximum limit of unproductive preparation for life--the day of graduation at college. Beyond that the young man must make his own way as best he might. The subject of this sketch chose to work his way by his own unaided efforts into the fullest measure of academic training.

That was before the day of competition between universities, and there was no temptation to go here rather than there in order to live a semi-parasitic existence as scholar or fellowship holder.

First in his father's counting house, and then at a boy's school near Niagara, young Brooks bravely gained the means to pursue higher branches of natural history, and to devote himself to research. In the former position he realized how futile for him would be a life given to money-getting, and he palliated the uncongenial nature of that life by such abstract thought as seemed useful, one immediate result of which was the invention of a mechanical device for computing interest and discounts in sterling money, that had considerable circulation. This, though it scarcely indicated a stronger bias for mathematics than for Nature study, showed a latent possibility that was not to be developed. In the latter position, which brought him in close contact with the wonders of time action, so plainly read in one of Nature's books for the blind--Niagara Falls--he found food for thought, as well as a deep interest in the action of young minds. Here was much material for philosophical study of wood life too, as well as for growth of conceptions of the way to learn and to teach.

Free, after serving three years, to follow his genius, Agassiz's romantic venture at Pennikese drew this young naturalist, as it did so many of that epoch; and henceforth marine life, with its revelation of fundamental problems, fascinated him. Working on at Agassiz's museum, learning its collections by heart, absorbing from this center of American natural history and from its founder both stimulus and method, influenced deeply also by the unobtrusive teachings of McCrady and others who helped to make Cambridge the Mecca of naturalists, he was already an active contributor to the discussion of problems in the embryology of animals when he won his Ph. D. degree in 1875.

Quiet, diffident, slow to speak, leaving hasty action, too, for those of other constitution, with thoughtful brow and keen eye to look outward, as well as to regard inner thought, this young man with flowing beard was a noticeable person. At this time he was to be seen always accompanied by his faithful "Tige"; for, wiser than Ulysses, he shared all the hardships and joys of life with this loved companion.

Now he sought his true environment, and found it in the new university starting in 1876--the Johns Hopkins University. There he was appointed Fellow, an honor subsequently won by many who are well known to biological science, as W. T. Sedgwick, E. B. Wilson, K. Mitsukuri, A. F. W. Schimper, H. H. Donaldson, H. L. Osborn, J. McKeen Cattell, H. H. Howell, A. T. Bruce, E. S. Lee, H. E. Nachtrieb, W. Noyes, J. Jastrow, E. B. Mall, H. V. Wilson, C. E. Hodge, S. Watase, and T. H. Morgan. Like C. O. Whitman, in 1879, he did not enter upon the privileges of that position, but as instructor and associate became at once a guiding element in the new growth. In the freedom from old traditions, from fixed conventions and routines offered by this new university, this peculiar original mind found its best environment, and while the opportunity doubtless did much for the man, the man certainly reacted most favorably for the welfare of the highest ideals of his new home.

We find him at once outspoken in emphasis of the philosophical aspect of animal morphology, contributing thoughts upon "inductive reasoning in morphological problems," upon "the relation between embryology and phylogeny," upon "the causes of serial and bilateral symmetry," and upon the "rhythmic nature" of the cleavage of an egg. Yet this period was also, and pre-eminently, one of acquisition of hard-earned and detailed facts. The development of Pulmonates and Lamellibranchs, of Crustacea and of Medusæ, as well as of the marvels of Salpa's life history, became absorbing studies.

This great field of the morphology of nonvertebrates could be properly worked only with access to the marine fauna, and at that date there were few facilities for seaside study in America. A true disciple of Louis Agassiz, Professor Brooks saw the need of a marine laboratory, and devoted himself, as Dohrn did at Naples, to the accomplishment of an end so necessary for the advance of natural science. Encouraged by the aid of a few citizens of Baltimore, in 1878 there was started an experiment--"The Chesapeake Zoölogical Laboratory," at Fort Wool, Va., with Professor Brooks as director. With the absolute devotion of its director to research as example, and with the liberal aid of the trustees of the Johns Hopkins University, this laboratory became a most important adjunct to the university and a virile center of zoölogical study. So great was its success as a factor in the advance of zoölogical knowledge that the trustees bravely continued to support it whenever financial disaster did not rob them of the last penny. For eight years in the Chesapeake, or in the remoter waters of North Carolina, the station flourished; then, in 1886, we find the director, with a few enthusiastic students, venturing in a small schooner to the but little known Bahama Island, Green Turtle Cay, there to enlarge their experiences with such delightful realization of naturalists' dreams of the tropics as Haeckel experienced in his Journey to Ceylon. Subsequent annual expeditions to Nassau, the Bemini Islands, and to various parts of Jamaica served as marked eras in the lives of many young naturalists who will not soon forget the contact with life thus obtained.

From these sources and from his connection with the United States Fish Commission, as director of the Marine Station at Woods Holl, Mass., in 1888, Professor Brooks drew inspiration and fact for the work and thought by which he is so well known to the working naturalist. There are few great divisions of the animal kingdom that have not excited his special interest and claimed his long-sustained labor upon the problems they express. Like McCrady, deeply fascinated by the _Hydromedusæ_ and their wonderful changes, many smaller papers, as well as the Memoir of the Boston Society of Natural History, entitled The Life History of the _Hydromedusæ_ and the Origin of Alternation of Generations, testify to his success in unraveling plots that thickened with new discoveries.

An early interest in the mollusca, shown by his doctor's dissertation upon the embryology of the fresh-water mussels, printed in part in the Proceedings of the American Association, 1875, continued to be expressed in his contributions to many problems in the embryology of the fresh-water Pulmonates, of Gasteropods, of Lamellibranchs, and of the Squid. The Crustacea also rightly claimed a large share of the attention of a philosophic naturalist, bringing him face to face with the rigid formulations of law which these creatures present. The discovery of the very exceptional method of cleavage in the egg of the decapod Lucifer, and the demonstration of the existence of a free Nauplius stage there (published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1882), marked a most important advance in the morphological interpretation of all Crustacea, and brought its author to the first rank as an authority upon this much-studied group. Studying and capturing at Beaufort those phantom-like sand burrowers, the Squilla, gained him an insight into and an interest in this strange division of Crustacea that enabled him to undertake that difficult task, the description of Stomatopods collected by the Challenger Expedition--a task completed in 1886. The report, published in such a magnificent series as only the British Government could have consummated, is noticeable for the author's clear, free illustration of the creatures described and classified. In it we find a classification of the numerous, weird, glassy larvæ, agreeing with the classification of the adults and marking the success of the solution of the problem--the reference of chance collections of various stages of many species to their proper places in the life history of each species.

When the fever for ancestral trees had spread among naturalists in a much more virulent form than that endemic in Wales, and when the Ascidians were brought into line as ancestral vertebrates, it was no wonder to find Professor Brooks laboring upon these interesting creatures, but his work in this group started from a different point of view. As early as 1875, when studying in the laboratory of Alexander Agassiz, he contributed to the Boston Society of Natural History a description involving a most novel interpretation of the embryology of a remarkable Ascidian, Salpa. This form is known to many not naturalists as that beautiful animal chain which is sometimes so common in the clear waters of Newport Harbor as to be dipped up in every bucket of water, but more often not there at all. The female buds forth male branches and gives each an egg (which is fertilized to form a second generation of females). There is thus no alteration of sexual and non-sexual generations at all; and, with characteristic appreciation of a paradox, Professor Brooks subsequently emphasized the fact that the poet naturalist Chamisso, in discovering, in 1814, "Alternation of Generations" in Salpa, had discovered a phenomenon where it did not exist, though subsequently found common enough in many other animals. With the continuity of interest so marked in him, the life history of Salpa, as thus revealed, continued to be one of the living thoughts in Professor Brooks's mind for a long period of years, and, with the accumulation of material and results of researches afforded by his summer work, culminated in the monograph Salpa--a quarto of nearly four hundred pages and fifty odd plates--published in 1893, or after nearly twenty years of sustained interest in this complex problem. In this volume we find first a coherent view of the intricate life history of this animal illuminated by such metaphors as make the necessary technicalities both readable and thinkable. For instance, "A chain of Salpa may be compared to two chains of cars on two parallel tracks, placed so that the middle of each car on one track is opposite the ends of two cars of the other track, and each joined by two couplings to the car in front of it on its own track, and in the same way to the one behind it, and also to those diagonally in front of it and behind it on the other track." Again, in speaking of that startling process of egg development that makes the embryology of Salpa one of the apparently insoluble problems of this branch of inquiry, he says: "Stated in a word, the most remarkable peculiarity of the Salpa embryology is this: It is blocked out in follicular cells, which form layers and undergo foldings and other changes which result in an outline or model of all the general features in the organization of the embryo. While these processes are going on the development of the blastomeres is retarded, so that they are carried into their final position in the embryo while still in a rudimentary condition. Finally, when they reach the places they are to occupy, they undergo rapid multiplication and growth and build up the tissues of the body, while the scaffolding of follicle cells is torn down and used up as food for the true embryonic cells. An imaginary illustration may help to make the subject clear. Suppose that while carpenters are building a house of wood the brick-makers pile clay on the boards as they are carried past, and shape the lumps of clay into bricks as they find them scattered through the building where they have been carried with the boards. Now, as the house of wood approaches completion, imagine the bricklayers build a brick house over the wooden framework and not from the bottom upward, but here and there wherever the bricks are to be found, and that as fast as parts of the brick house are finished the wooden one is torn down. To make the analogy complete we must imagine that all the structure which is removed is assimilated by the bricks, and is thus turned into the substance of new bricks to carry on the construction."

Following that descriptive portion of the work comes a most interesting interweaving of facts gathered in wide experience with a scientific imagination possible only to one who had lived and thought in close sympathetic contact with tropical marine life. It is an account of the present conditions of life along tropical shores and the probable steps that led to the evolution of the innumerable sedentary and creeping things from the ancestral forms that floated on the surface of the ocean before there were shores. Charming reading for the layman, and for the specialist a broadening poetic insight into life as it is and as it was when the world was young and the pelagic forbears of the vertebrates competed with their simpler associates in the annexation of the bottom as a vantage ground for the "benevolent assimilation" of later immigrants. The third portion of the work follows a most commendable plan: "Scientific controversy is so unprofitable that I shall try to make it as subordinate as possible, that the reader may devote all his attention to the life history of Salpa, without interruption at every point where my own observations confirm or contradict the statements of others." This section deals with the refutation of criticism of the author's interpretations, and endeavors to harmonize the discords that in this, as in all complex morphological research, make progress slow though surer.

The above brief references to the research work of the subject of this sketch would be too incomplete did we omit mention of his papers upon that very interesting and extremely ancient inhabitant of the Chesapeake, the Lingula, or of the beautifully illustrated memoir of the National Academy of Sciences, describing the crania of the Lucayan Indians, an unfortunate race of gentle beings discovered by the Spaniards and treated as part of the live stock of the New World and soon annihilated, leaving but a few bones, and, as Professor Brooks tells us, our familiar and pleasant word "hammocks," as evidences of their having been.

Coming to maturity in the period of general acceptance of the Darwinian hypothesis of organic evolution, Professor Brooks was naturally deeply influenced, and no one who has read his works can doubt his allegiance to natural selection as a powerful factor in the formation of the present order of living things. In the American Naturalist for 1877 he published the first outlines of a provisional hypothesis of pangenesis that sought to "combine the hypotheses of Owen, Spencer, and Darwin in such a way as to escape the objections to which each is in itself liable, and at the same time to retain all that renders them valuable." In 1883 the same hypothesis--that variations are perpetuated chiefly through the male line by special gemmules, and that the female is essentially conservative--was elaborated in book form under the title of The Law of Heredity.

Thenceforth, in intervals of research work, Professor Brooks has contributed to various periodicals, notably the Popular Science Monthly, such essays upon kindred topics as spontaneously arose in his mind in connection with current work here and abroad. Some of these of a general philosophical interest have been incorporated with lectures, originally given to students in Baltimore, as The Foundations of Zoölogy, brought out this year by the Macmillan Company as Volume V of the Columbia University Biological Series. This, it will be noted, is dedicated "To Hobart College, where I learned to study, and, I hope, to profit by, but not blindly to follow, the writings of that great thinker on the principles of science, George Berkeley," and its keynote might be said to be difficult to hold, expressing the standpoint of one who says "The proof that there is no necessary antagonism between mechanical explanations of human life and belief in volition and duty and moral responsibility seems to me to be very simple and easy to understand."

Though thus active in pushing forward the limit of fact and theory in the domain of pure science, Professor Brooks has not shirked the duty that falls to every member of society, but has labored earnestly to build a sound basis for immediate practical application of zoölogical research. In 1876 he organized a summer zoölogical laboratory for teachers and others in Cleveland, with the co-operation of two other young Clevelanders--A. H. Tuttle, now Professor of Biology in the University of Virginia, and I. B. Comstock, Professor of Geology in the University of Arizona.

Identifying himself with the interests of the community in which he had cast his lot, he interested himself in the establishment of such educational influences as that of a public aquarium, and it was through no fault of the sower that the seed laboriously sown fell upon stony ground. In the winter of 1880 he gave a course of lectures and of laboratory work for teachers in the schools of Baltimore.

Again, his early studies of the development of the oyster (for which he was awarded the medal of the Société d'Acclimatisation of Paris in 1883), his discovery that the American oyster could be reared like fish from artificially fertilized eggs, since he found it to have a different life history from its European fellow, led him to realize the greater possibilities that awaited our oyster industries when they should be based upon scientific fact. Living amid a population dependent to no small extent upon these industries, Professor Brooks threw himself with enthusiasm into the problem of warding off the ruin that comes to every enterprise expanding faster than its capital is replenished, and eagerly sought the means to magnify without deterioration so important a factor in the existence of the Commonwealth. As chairman of the Oyster Commission appointed by the General Assembly of Maryland in 1882, he drew up the long, detailed, and well-illustrated report, issued in 1884, which set forth the condition of the oyster beds in the Chesapeake Bay and their deterioration from overwork, and suggested a legislative remedy in the form of a bill designed to remove this industry from that primitive, barbaric stage in which our communal ownership of migrant birds and fish still remains, and to place it upon the secure basis of personal ownership underlying other live-stock business. But it is difficult to change the customs of centuries' standing, and prophets rarely see the fulfillment of their predictions. Many lectures and the issue of a popular book--The Oyster, 1891--were necessary labors assumed by Professor Brooks before the public mind was educated to some appreciation of the nature of the problem, and the fruits of his labors are yet to be matured and gathered.

But it is not so much by discovery of new facts or by aid to the community in which one may chance to live that a man exerts his best influence upon mankind; rather by his success in inspiring others to see whatever of good there may be in his point of view and method of attack upon old problems, that his followers may keep alive and enlarge what he stands for in the growth of civilization. As a teacher Professor Brooks has exerted a powerful influence by the stimulus of example in his whole-hearted devotion to research, by originality of suggestion, and by his clear intuition of the essential factors in morphological problems. Convinced that naturalists, like poets, are born and not made--or, if so, then self-made--his teaching has been free from that too easily acquired hallucination that the forcible introduction of facts, and frequent extraction of words by means of examination, are a possible means to the making of zoölogists, or what you will to order, to be ticketed and branded as such after a fixed term of the above process. Those who are strong enough to grow in the open have found in him a genial sunshine, but those needing hothouse forcing have sometimes missed, perhaps, the care necessary to bring them to a marketable state.

Many who have followed his lectures will recall the clearness and simplicity with which complex and puzzling questions were presented to their minds; the skull of the bony fish soon lost its terrors, while the homologies of the limb bones were brought to the mind in a graphic way, sure to leave a deep impression. Directness and lucidity, with freedom from investment of unessentials, are characteristics of his teaching and prominent features in his too little known Handbook of Marine Zoölogy, which, despite technical faults, was so original and honest, so free from closet natural history, that it marked an era in the advance of biological instruction. It was a direct appeal to the concrete study of living animals at a time when zoölogy for students was still the learning of text-books, and text-books were too often in spirit but modernizations of Pliny or of Aldrovandus.

It is this removal of the impeding paraphernalia of custom-bound authority, and a direct, childlike communion with Nature in search of truth by one's unaided labor, that this man has to offer to those who come under his sway as teacher; with what success will be evident from the work of those who recently united to honor his fiftieth birthday with a portrait that might recall him to them as he taught them, and from the work of those who, in coming years, will enjoy the privilege of contact with his genius and be led to "seek admission to the temple of natural knowledge naked and not ashamed, like little children."

* * * * *

FORESTRY, Professor Fernow said in his paper at the American Association, is not, as it seems to be popularly believed, "Woodman, spare that tree," but "Woodman, cut those trees judiciously." The handling of a slowly maturing crop like forest trees requires especial consideration of a problem quite unlike any other that presents itself to the business man. The trees ripen slowly, a full century often being necessary to the complete development of growth. Obviously it would be inadvisable to cut down the product and then wait a hundred years for further income from the land; another system is necessary, where merely the interest is taken, in trees which are in a condition to cut, while the principal, the forest itself, remains always practically intact.

Editor's Table.

_PRIMITIVE MAN._

Two articles contributed to the April and May numbers of the Fortnightly Review by Mr. J. G. Frazer, the learned author of The Golden Bough, and more recently of a monumental edition of Pausanias, are worthy of the close attention of all who are interested in the early history of mankind. The articles are entitled The Origin of Totemism, and the object of the writer is to show that on this obscure subject a flood of light has been shed by the lately published researches of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen into the beliefs and practices of the native tribes of central Australia, those tribes being perhaps the best representatives now anywhere surviving of the most primitive condition of the human race. Mr. Baldwin Spencer, formerly a Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, is at present Professor of Biology in the University of Melbourne, while Mr. Gillen is a special magistrate in South Australia, charged with the protection of the aborigines. In their work, Mr. Frazer observes, "We possess for the first time a full and authentic account of thoroughly primitive savages living in the totem stage and practically unaffected by European influence. Its importance," he adds, "as a document of human history can, therefore, hardly be overestimated."

Evolution, it has often been remarked, and is again remarked by the writer of these articles, is an outcome of the struggle for life, and is rapid and vigorous or slow and feeble, according to the intensity of the struggle and the number and variety of the competing elements. Among the great land masses of our planet Australia is the smallest; and, owing to this circumstance, and also to its physical conformation, which renders large areas unfit for the maintenance of life, population has been much restricted and competition has been at a minimum. Hence the extremely backward and undeveloped condition of its native tribes, a condition which enables us, as Mr. Frazer observes, to detect humanity in the chrysalis stage, and mark the first blind gropings of our race after liberty and light.

The account given of these tribes contains indeed some very remarkable details. For example, "though they suffer much from cold at night under the frosty stars of the clear Australian heaven, the idea of using as garments the warm furs of the wild animals they kill and eat has never entered into their minds." They attribute the propagation of the human race wholly to the action of spirits, to whom they attribute a fecundating power, treating as wholly irrelevant to the matter any contact of the sexes. The idea of natural causation seems to be one which they have no power to grasp. They believe that various results are dependent on special antecedent conditions, but it is a pure matter of accident what they shall conceive the conditions in any case to be. Here we come to the origin of totemism. Heretofore totemism has been considered, broadly speaking, as the identification of themselves by some group of savages with a particular plant or animal or other manifestation of the powers of Nature, accompanied by a complete or partial _taboo_, so far as the group in question is concerned, of the animal or other object adopted as totem, and also by a rule prohibiting marriage within the group. What Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have succeeded in doing has been to observe and detect the significance of certain practices of the Australian tribes which have never been observed, or at least never understood, before.

At a certain time of the year, it appears, each totemistic tribe goes through elaborate ceremonies of a purely magical character for the purpose of promoting the growth and multiplication of the particular animal or plant, if it be one useful for food, with which the tribe is identified, or of antagonizing its evil effects if it be of a hurtful character. As "there is scarcely an object, animate or inanimate, to be found in the country occupied by the natives which does not give its name to some totemic group of individuals," the general scheme of things is pretty well looked after in the various ceremonies that are practiced by the different groups. Attention is here drawn to the essential difference between religion and magic, religion being an attempt to propitiate or conciliate the higher powers, while magic undertakes to coerce them. "To the magician," as Mr. Frazer observes, "it is a matter of indifference whether the cosmic powers are conscious or unconscious, spiritual or material; for in either case he imagines that he can force them by his enchantments to do his bidding." The ceremonies of the native Australians, as we have said, are wholly magical. They have the same kind of faith in their incantations and other strange performances that the modern man of science has in the preparations he makes for a physical experiment. The difference is that imagination or the crudest kind of symbolism has suggested the methods of the savage, while a careful scrutiny and comparison of facts has dictated those of the man of science. The _proprium_ of the savage mind is an utter insensibility to evidence, or rather a lack of all power of conceiving what evidence is, and therefore a total incapacity for feeling any need of it. The scientific man, on the other hand, feels that he needs it every hour and every moment.

It may be interesting to quote the description given by Mr. Frazer, after Messrs. Spencer and Gillen, of the ceremonies performed by the men whose totem is the "witchetty grub," a creature much prized as an article of diet by the natives.

"The men of the witchetty-grub totem repair to a shallow cave in a ravine where lies a large block of quartzite, surrounded by some small rounded stones. The large block represents the full-grown grub; the small stones stand for the eggs. On reaching the cave the head man of the totem group begins to sing, while he taps the large block with a wooden trough, such as is used for scooping the earth out of burrows. All the other men at the same time tap it with twigs of a particular gum tree, chanting the while. The burden of their song is an invitation to the insect to go and lay eggs. Next, the leader takes up one of the smaller stones, representing an egg, and strikes each man in the stomach with it, saying, 'You have eaten much food,' after which he butts at the man's stomach with his forehead.... Ceremonies of the same sort are performed at ten different places. When the round has been completed the party returns home. Here, at some distance from the camp, a long structure of boughs has been got ready; it is designed to represent the chrysalis from which the full-grown insect emerges. Into this structure the men, each with the sacred design of the totem painted in red ochre and pipe clay on his body, enter and sing of the grub in the various stages of its development. After chanting thus for a while they shuffle out of the mock chrysalis one by one, with a gliding motion, singing all the time about the emergence of the real insect out of the real chrysalis, of which their own performance is clearly an imitation."

The Emu men have their own ceremonies, equally elaborate and quite as well adapted to promote the multiplication of emus as those of the witchetty-grub men to produce an abundance of witchetty grubs. The earnestness which is thrown into these ceremonies is beyond all question; and it seems to be clear that each totemic group in turn takes up its own burden of social responsibility: each has its duty to the tribe as a whole, and performs it to the best of its ability. Through their united efforts, as they firmly believe, the various processes of Nature are maintained in satisfactory activity; the succulent grub comes forth in due season and in reasonable quantity; the emu, the kangaroo, the bandicoot, and other useful animals keep up their numbers and continue to furnish food for the community; the hakea flower and the manna of the mulga tree grow in normal abundance; the winds blow; the streams flow; the clouds yield rain and the sun goes on shining by day and the stars by night, with, on the whole, an admirable regularity. A more satisfactory system it would really be difficult to conceive. How absurd, not to say profane, it would be for any one to suggest that ceremonies which were so abundantly justified by results might without danger be omitted! Skepticism is indeed very much out of place in certain stages of human development.

The interesting feature, however, as Mr. Frazer holds, in the descriptions given by the two Australian writers we have named is the proof they afford that totemism, instead of being an irrational, unexplainable aberration of the nascent intellect of man, was really a scheme for securing the greatest possible multiplicity of benefits for the savage community. The whole tribe was divided into groups, and each group undertook to look after some function of Nature and keep it up to the mark. Here was a notable step in the direction of division of labor. How it came about that the particular animal or plant which was the totem of a group became wholly or partially _taboo_ to the group is not very easily explained; but it seems not impossible that some sense of tribal duty, gradually developed, kept those who were credited with providing any particular food element from being themselves greedy consumers of it. So far as that article was concerned they may have felt themselves as sustaining somewhat the character of hosts or entertainers of the tribe, and it may thus have become the custom that they should either not partake at all of that special thing, or partake of it only sparingly. If so, we find the foundations already laid both of politeness and of morality. It is an interesting question how far the notions which have been described have died out of modern civilized society. That they are wholly extinct it would be rash to affirm. There are many traces, indeed, of the surviving influence of symbolism, and here and there lingering tendencies toward a belief in magic are easily discoverable. Perhaps the wisest of us may learn to understand ourselves a little better by studying the operations of the human mind in its very earliest stages, before reason had yet shaken itself free from the random suggestions of sense.

_THE BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY AND SCIENCE._

Apropos of the recent notable issue, by the Boston Public Library, of a comprehensive Bibliography of the Anthropology and Ethnology of Europe, to accompany Professor Ripley's Races of Europe, the twofold and diversely opposed interests of a great institution of this sort are called to mind. On the one hand are its manifold obligations to the great mass of the public, to the average reader, to the ubiquitous novel and fiction consumer, to private clubs, and to school children. A field of activity and value in popular education is involved, scarcely secondary to that of the public schools, appealing to the general reader, the taxpayer, and, above all, to the well-wisher for democratic political institutions and representative government in the future. In stimulating work of this character in Boston, in bringing the Public Library into deserved prominence among the educational institutions of the community, Mr. Herbert Putnam achieved great and deserved success during his administration, winning commendation upon all sides.

The second aspect of public library duty is revealed by the recent undertaking at Boston above mentioned. It concerns the relations of great libraries to science, to original research, not to the average reader, but to the specialist. Instead of the purchase of twenty copies of David Harum, or perhaps of A Bloodthirsty and Self-laudatory History of the Recent Spanish War, by One who killed fifty men with his own hand, to meet a sudden demand on the part of readers, the expenditure of perhaps an equal sum of money for some rare and costly work in a foreign language, intelligible to but half a hundred men in the entire city, is involved. Such obligations do not of course rest upon libraries of secondary size and importance. Their path of duty is clearly marked out for them in the interests of the public, both on the score of financial ability and of demand as well. With the leading libraries of the country the case is different. Our universities are fast taking rank with the very best in Europe. Specialists in science and technology, the peers of those abroad, are plentiful on every hand. Oftentimes their private means are as limited as their appreciation and ambition are great. Without these rare books--the tools of their trade--they are powerless. In former days they were denied the opportunity for research, or else were obliged to spend months of study in Europe. We have the men and the minds here in America now; there is every indication that the books and apparatus are speedily becoming available as well.

This Bibliography of the Boston Public Library is a case in point. A collection of works relating to the physical history, the origins, migrations, and languages of the peoples of Europe is indicated upon its shelves, in all probability, we venture to predict, superior to any single one existing in Europe. This startling statement is based upon several considerations familiar to any specialist. Scientific book materials are of two classes. The first are the expensive and compendious volumes, generally to be found in great libraries, although oftentimes the paucity of their scientific collections is very surprising, especially in all that concerns the newer sciences of biology, anthropology, and the like. The second order of publications, often rarer and scientifically more valuable than the first, are the scattered monographs or pamphlets published in all manner of forms and by societies, oftentimes ephemeral and of all degrees of eminence. This second class of materials is generally richly represented in the collections of the various scientific societies, especially in the form of reprints presented by the authors. But the great and expensive tomes are seldom thus presented, and the societies can seldom afford to purchase them. Thus it comes about that these two classes of raw materials have to be separately hunted down, being rarely found together. For example, the library of the Société d'Anthropologie at Paris, judging by its printed catalogues, while abounding in scattered monographs and reprints, contains very few of the expensive volumes. One must seek these, and if they be in English or German, very likely in vain, in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The Public Library of the city of Boston has apparently tried an experiment in this direction, and is certainly to be congratulated upon the result. To a very rich collection of standard works has been added, by co-operation with a special investigator, a large part of the _flotsam_ and _jetsam_ which is of such extreme value to the student of original sources. The library has set a worthy example of encouragement to research; it has offered definite proof of the ability of our American institutions to rival their European contemporaries. And a peculiarly appropriate rounding-out to the successful career in the distinctively popular phases of administration of the institution of the late librarian, Mr. Herbert Putnam, is afforded in this work, the last at Boston officially, perhaps, to bear his signature and the stamp of his approval.

_OUR RACE TROUBLES._

The article which we publish in the present number of the Monthly, under the title of The Race Problem in the United States, is a sequel to one which appeared in the May number entitled The Negro Question. Both writers have a special acquaintance with the subject, and are widely known as active workers for the elevation of the negro race--Mr. Booker T. Washington, the writer of the second article, being himself one of its most distinguished representatives. While both manifest abundant sympathy with the negro, and a deep sense of the pressing nature of the problems to which the presence of a large negro element in the population of certain of our States gives rise, they virtually acknowledge that it is extremely difficult in discussing the subject to do more than present a few broad general views. That there is a very bad condition of things in some of our Southern States no one will dispute. The crimes which have been committed by white men, in avenging real or supposed crimes committed by black men, stamp a character of utter savagery on the communities in which they have occurred, and in which they have remained unpunished. At the same time there is no doubt that the existence of so large a negro element in the South constitutes a serious obstacle to the moral and intellectual as well as to the economic development of that part of the country, and tends to keep alive a dangerous condition of public feeling. Our contributor, Dr. Curry, states significantly that he could give very impressive details on this point, were it not that it would furnish altogether too unpleasant reading.

What are we going to do about it? No doubt we have before us an illustration of the old adage, "The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge." The South had its "peculiar institution" for some generations, and held to it with extraordinary tenacity--went to war rather than give it up. Now, by the simple force of events, the old patriarchal and slaveholding system is broken up, and there the former slaves and their descendants are--emancipated citizens who have their rights under the Constitution, and who therefore have to be reckoned with. They can not be deported against their will; they have the same right to live in the country that any white man has.

Manifestly there is but one honorable way of dealing with the blacks, and that is to treat them with absolute justice. Upon this point we are in entire agreement with Mr. Booker T. Washington. If a black man is excluded from the suffrage on account of his ignorance, let the equally ignorant white man be equally excluded. We have great faith in the educative effect of justice, and a firm administration of law. It would at once raise the self-respect of the negro to know that what was law for the white man was law for him, and _vice versa_; and self-respect is a sure ground for further advance. In the matter of education, we hold that education for the colored race should be almost wholly of a practical kind. We go further, and say that the education given to white children everywhere might with great advantage be much more practical than it is. The proper education for any individual is that which will tend to make him more efficient, successful, and self-sufficing in the position which he is called to occupy. This principle, far from implying a stationary condition of the individual, is precisely the one which provides best for his advancement. It is the man who is thoroughly competent for the work he has at any given moment to do who passes beyond that work to something better. The misery of existing systems of education is that to so large extent they educate for a hypothetical position beyond that for which an immediate preparation is necessary. The result is that the schools unload upon the community year by year a levy of adventurous youths who at once begin to live by their wits in no very creditable sense, and who constitute a distinct menace to the stability of society.

We would therefore urge most earnestly upon all who take an interest in the education of the colored race to keep in view above all things the importance and necessity of fitting the negro to take an active part in the practical industries of the country, and above all in agriculture. An education directed mainly to this end would do far more to develop his intelligence than one of a more abstract and ambitious character and would furnish a far better foundation for success in life. Far from tying the negro down to manual occupations, it would prepare the way for his eventual participation in all occupations. But occupation for occupation, where is there one that can reasonably be rated higher than the intelligent and successful cultivation of the soil? If the negro problem can not be solved by common sense and common honesty it can not be solved at all. Before giving it up as insoluble we should make full proof of these homely specifics. We have long been proclaiming that the negro is a man and a brother; let us therefore treat him as such, and if we find out anything that is particularly good for his moral and intellectual improvement, let us try a little of it ourselves. It surely will not do us any harm.

Scientific Literature.

SPECIAL BOOKS.

_The Lesson of Popular Government_[12] is a fruit of thirty years' study, by Mr. _Bradford_, of certain peculiarities in the political workings of our institutions. The book is not for those who consider it patriotic to shut their eyes to whatever is going wrong, but for those whose regard for the Federal Constitution and the organization of our governments is only increased by the consciousness of the strain to which they are exposed, and who feel strongly that while the principles of the Government and the character of the people "are still sound and reliable, some modifications and readjustments of the machinery must take place, unless we are to drift through practical anarchy and increasing corruption to military despotism." For the sake of putting the subject in a clearer light, the three more prominent approaches to democratic government in modern times--those of England, France, and the United States--are studied comparatively in the former part of the work. The carrying on of governments in accordance with the expressed wish of the people is spoken of in the beginning as the appearance of a new force which has changed the whole face of society, and points to still greater changes in the future. How it has worked in the three countries in which it has been in operation for a little more than a century, and what it has done, are the questions which the author undertakes to answer. In England, popular government has taken the form, with a powerless hereditary sovereign commanding universal loyalty, of a ministry responsible to a Parliament, which is directly responsible to the people. In France, the executive is controlled by a legislative body chosen by universal suffrage, the majority of which is held together by party discipline. The virtue of this government is undergoing a supreme test in the Dreyfus case, the right issue of which would show a greater proportional advance in true liberty and the justification of popular government than has taken place in any other nation. In the United States, power is passing more and more into Congress, a body chosen separately from the President, whose members are actuated by personal, local, and partisan motives, and rarely rise to the conception of broad national views or look further than to the immediate present, while the nation at large and the Executive are without representation such as insures the co-operation of the ministry and Parliament in England. In all other respects than appointments to office, which must be made "in strict subordination to the demands of members of his party in both Houses of Congress," the recognized power of the Executive is confined within very narrow limits. In matters of legislation he has no voice whatever beyond general recommendations, such as are open to any citizen, and to which Congress pays little or no attention. In fact, that body resents anything like an expression of opinion from the President. The system is not encouraging to the filling of the office by men of the first rank, and men of that rank seldom reach it. The House of Representatives, meeting every two years a new body, suffers from its entire want of coherency and the absence of a qualified leader, and falls an easy prey to the lobbyist and the boss. So, while "there are still many, perhaps the majority, of men of good character in public life, the tendency is steadily downward." It has been customary in some quarters to charge the evils we suffer upon universal suffrage, but Mr. Bradford maintains that it is this which to-day is keeping up the character of the Government, and that but for the restraints imposed by it our political condition would be a great deal worse than it is. Further light is sought upon the situation, and further pictures are given of the conditions existing in comprehensive reviews of the State and municipal governments of the country. In considering proposed remedies the referendum is dismissed as tending to destroy personality and diffuse responsibility even more than is done now--the reverse of the concentration of executive power as the only really indispensable part of the Government, which should be sought. The enforcement of this principle of executive supremacy with immediate responsibility is the purpose of the book. Mr. Bradford would obtain this by giving the representatives of the administrative departments seats in the House, with power to suggest legislation, make explanations, and participate in debate. His final argument is that it can not be charged that democracy is a failure; but, "with a wholly new force introduced into the world, the proper machinery for its application has not yet been employed. In its nature it is reasonable, sound, and, on the whole, beneficent." Using the words of an English writer, "the failures of government in the United States are not the result of democracy, but of the craftiest combination of schemes to defeat the will of democracy ever devised in the world."

[Footnote 12: The Lesson of Popular Government. By Gamaliel Bradford. New York: The Macmillan Company. Two volumes. Pp. 520 and 590. Price, $4.]

We have already published a fairly comprehensive review of _Richard Semon's In the Australian Bush_,[13] based upon the German original, by Prof. E. P. Evans, in the fifty-second volume of the Monthly (November, 1897). But little needs to be added to what Professor Evans has said of the book besides announcing the appearance of the English edition, the translation for which was written under the author's own superintendence, and the contents of which do not differ in any important particular from the German impression. Professor Semon went to Australia on a special zoölogical mission, and spent two years there. His purpose was the study of the wonderful Australian fauna, the oviparous mammals, marsupials, and ceratodus (lungfish). These animals represent forms which, with a few notable exceptions, have long since become extinct in other countries, where they have to be studied in such parts of their bony forms as happen to have been preserved in the rocks, while here they can be examined alive and in the flesh--"living fossils," as the author fittingly calls them, links between the present age and one of the geological periods of the past. His observations on these subjects are in course of publication in a special scientific work, not quite half of which has appeared. The present volume consists in the notes of travel and adventure, the dealing with men, the anthropological studies, and what we might call the _obiter_ observations of the expedition. Almost simultaneously with Professor Semon's narrative we have from the same publishers another book, on _The Native Tribes of Central Australia_,[14] which deals more fully, exclusively, and perhaps more expertly with the anthropology of a part of the Australian continent. Of the authors, Mr. _Gillen_ has spent the greater part of the past twenty years in the center of the continent, and as sub-protector of the aborigines has had exceptional opportunities of coming in contact with the Arunta tribe; and both of them have been made fully initiated members of that tribe. Though both about Australia, the two books do not cover the same ground. Australia is very large, and its physical conditions are such that the groups of tribes inhabiting the various regions have for a long period of time been isolated from one another and have followed different lines in development. Professor Semon's observations were made in the Burnett district of northeastern Queensland, while those recorded in the work of Spencer and Gillen were made in the very center of South Australia and of the continent. Consequently, in reading them we read really about different things. In addition to the investigation of various customs, such as those connected with initiation and magic, special attention has been paid by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen to the totemic system and to matters connected with the social organization of the tribes; and here again the authors insist upon the differences between the groups of tribes, and that the customs of no one tribe or group can be taken as typical of Australia generally in any other sense than as broad outline. Both works deal with considerable fullness with the institution of marriage among the Australians, and the customs by which too close intermarriage is prevented. Among other subjects treated with especial fullness by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen are the totems, the bull-roarers, the Intichuma ceremonies (associated with the totems), the initiation ceremonies, customs relative to the knocking out of teeth, traditions, burial and mourning, spirit individuals, medicine men and magic, methods of obtaining wives, myths, clothing, weapons, implements, decorative art, and names. Professor Semon formed a moderate opinion of the capacity of the Australians. Though coarse and heavy, their faces are not bad looking and have expression. They are "no link between monkeys and men, but human creatures through and through," though of one of the lowest types. They have no pottery, no agriculture, no abstract ideas of any kind, can not count very far, but are clever in learning to write, read, and draw, are experts in signaling, and have their intellect and senses "brilliantly developed in all directions bearing on the hunt," with great dexterity in the use of weapons.

[Footnote 13: In the Australian Bush, and on the Coast of the Coral Sea. Being the Experiences and Observations of a Naturalist in Australia, New Guinea, and the Moluccas. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 552. Price, $6.50.]

[Footnote 14: The Native Tribes of Central Australia. By Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 671, with maps and plates. Price, $6.50.]

GENERAL NOTICES.

Miss _Mary H. Kingsley_ has given in her _West African Studies_[15] a book marked by pungent wit and striking originality in its sketches of adventure and observation, and containing in the chapters devoted to ethnology results of her personal studies. She was already known by a record of her adventures of a young Englishwoman traveling alone through some of the worst regions of West Africa, embodied in her book Travels in West Africa, which was published in the latter part of 1898. The present book may be regarded, as its name implies, as the result and the embodiment of the afterthoughts of that hazardous journey. It includes, after descriptions in which the unconventional directness of expression is much to be remarked, an account of African characteristics and a description of fishing in West Africa, chapters of a soberer sort on fetich, schools of fetich, witchcraft, African medicine and the witch doctor, and historical and economical chapters on Early Trade, French Discovery, Commerce, the Crown Colony System and some of its incidents, The Clash of Cultures, and African Property. Miss Kingsley's criticisms of the present system of administration being regarded as rather destructive, she endeavors to set forth, in a chapter entitled An Alternative Plan, "some other way wherein the African colonies could be managed." Special attention is invited by the author to two articles in the appendix to the volume by M. le Comte C. N. de Cardi and Mr. John Harford. We are pleased to note the high appreciation which Miss Kingsley expresses of the anthropological work concerning west-coast tribes of our former contributor, Colonel A. B. Ellis--Sir A. B. Ellis when he died.

[Footnote 15: West African Studies. By Mary H. Kingsley. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 633, with Map. Price, $5.]

Mr. _Frederick Palmer's In the Klondyke_[16] is an unpretentious book and free from the appearance of sensationalism, but gives a clear and graphic account of the region and its ways and of the getting there at the breaking up of winter. The author was at Dyea late in February, having intended to go with a Government relief expedition which had found no occasion to proceed farther. Being thus left out, he undertook, with dogs and sledges and two companions who proved congenial, the "untried journey" of six hundred miles over the ice fields of the Lewes Lakes and the ice packs of the Yukon River, which had been the contemplated route of the expedition. The start was made about the 18th of March, with little time to spare, because the Yukon was expected to become impassable by the 20th of April. The Chilkoot Pass was achieved in a day, and the rest of the journey was made "downhill with the current of the river at the rate of eight inches to the mile," in weather that became very variable, with now hard freezing and now slush in the middle of the day. The difficulties of the journey must have been formidable, with considerable suffering, besides a week in a hut with the measles, but no complaint further than the mention of the incidents appears in the author's story. On some of the days the thermometer ranged from 10° to 20° below zero at two o'clock in the morning, to 80° above at night, and the author "had one ear blistered by the frost and the other by the sun in the same day." The party arrived at Dawson just four days before the final break-up of the ice in the river. Accounts corresponding in temper and vividness with that of the journey are given of Dawson, the miners and mining, the history of the Klondyke mining enterprise, Klondyke types of character and adventure, the toils and trials and profit and losses of the "Pilgrims," the workings of the Government, and the return home to civilization--which does not appear, after all, to have offered transcendentally superior attractions to those who had experienced the pleasure of adventure.

[Footnote 16: In the Klondyke, including an Account of a Winter's Journey to Dawson. By Frederick Palmer. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 218, with plates. Price, $1.50.]

The _History of Physics in its Elementary Branches_[17] has been prepared by Professor _Cajori_ in the belief that some attention to the history of a science helps to make it attractive, and that the general view of the development of the human intellect gained in reading a history on the subject is in itself stimulating and liberalizing. The author has had in mind Professor Ostwald's characterization of the absence of the historical sense and the want of knowledge of the great researches upon which the edifice of science rests as a defect in the present method of teaching. The subject is treated by periods. In ancient times the Greeks, while displaying wonderful creative genius in metaphysics, literature, and art, being ignorant of the method of experimentation, achieved relatively little in natural science. The Roman scientific writers were contented to collect the researches of Greek professors. Except in a few instances the Arabs did not distinguish themselves in original research. Writers in the middle ages were only commentators, and knew nothing of personal investigation. The physicist of the renascence abandoned scholastic speculation and began to study Nature in the language of experiment. The seventeenth century was a period of great experimental as well as theoretical activity. In the eighteenth century speculation was less effectively restrained and guided by experiments. The nineteenth century "has overthrown the leading theories of the previous one hundred years, and has largely built anew on the older foundations laid during the seventeenth century." The evolution of physical laboratories, first for teachers and then for students, is the subject of the last chapter.

[Footnote 17: A History of Physics in its Elementary Branches, including the Evolution of Physical Laboratories. By Florian Cajori. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 322. Price, $1.60.]

"The Great Commanders Series" of D. Appleton and Company is enriched by a biography of _General Sherman_,[18] whom the author, General _Manning F. Force_, styles "the most picturesque figure in our civil war." He was more than this; he was its scholar and statesman--a man distinguished by the possession of high military combined with the best civil qualities. Further, as General Force well says, "his character was absolutely pure and spotless." In his dealings with the Vigilance Committee in San Francisco he assumed a position which it required courage of a much higher order than a soldier's to maintain. While comfortably situated as an honored professor in the State Military Academy of Louisiana when the Legislature passed the Ordinance of Secession, he had no hesitation in deciding what to do. He at once gave in his resignation in a letter that is a model of manliness, declaring his preference "to maintain allegiance to the Constitution of the United States as long as a fragment of it survives." His career as a general in the civil war is described at length. Through it all his foresight, seeking always to accomplish the most with the least expenditure and ultimate suffering, to which his strategy was adapted, is conspicuous. At this time and afterward his supreme thought appears to have been as to what would best conduce to the permanent good of the republic. To his military ability and self-effacing patriotism he added a far-seeing wisdom in council that could always be relied upon. "In his most unguarded words his principle was always clear, noble, and intensely patriotic, and his careless colloquial expressions often covered a practical wisdom and insight of a most striking kind."

[Footnote 18: General Sherman. By General Manning F. Force. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 353.]

In preparing their _Text-Book of Algebra_[19] the authors, assuming that mental discipline is of the first importance to every student of mathematics, have endeavored to present the elements of the science in a clear and logical form, while yet keeping the needs of beginners constantly in mind. Special attention is given to making clear the reason for every step taken; each principle is first illustrated by particular examples, and then rules and suggestions for performing the operation are laid down. The authors have endeavored to avoid apparent conciseness at the expense of clearness and accuracy, and have thereby made their volume somewhat larger than ordinary text-books. Features to which attention is called are the development of the fundamental operations with algebraic numbers and the concrete illustrations of these operations; the use of type forms in multiplication and division and in factoring; the application of factoring to the solution of equations; the solutions of equations based upon equivalent equations and equivalent systems of equations; the treatment of irrational equations; the discussions of general problems and the interpretation of positive, negative, zero, intermediate, and infinite solutions of problems; the treatment of inequalities and their applications; the outline of a discussion of irrational numbers; a brief introduction to imaginary and complex numbers; and the great number of graded examples and problems.

[Footnote 19: Text-Book of Algebra, with Exercises for Secondary Schools and Colleges. By George Egbert Fisher and Isaac J. Schwatt. Part I. Philadelphia: Fisher & Schwatt. Pp. 683. Price, $1.25.]

The material of the _Primary Arithmetic_, Number Studies for the Second, Third, and Fourth Grades, of _A. R. Hornbrook_ (American Book Company), has been chosen with careful reference to the development of the number sense of little children, as noticed by the author and as reported by many other observers. A distinctive feature of the work is the use of diagrams called "number tables," as a concrete basis for the child's thinking while he is getting his first ideas of the facts of the addition and multiplication tables. In them the numbers up to one hundred are presented in columns of tens, and so handled as to exhibit to the child's conception the relations of the several digits. By their use he first learns the properties of ten, then of two, and so on of the others--not presented in regular order, but with a view of exhibiting special properties--and their relations to one another. The method is ingenious and appears useful.

The study on _Rhode Island and the Formation of the Union_, of the Columbia University Series in History, Economics, and Public Law (The Macmillan Company, New York), was undertaken by Mr. _Frank Greene Bates_ in order to ascertain why Rhode Island so long delayed its ratification of the Federal Constitution. The delay seems to have been largely a matter of the assertion of State rights, in which Rhode Island appears at that time to have been but little, if any, behind South Carolina. Liberty "was the presiding genius of the spiritual life of the colony, and the principle of freedom of conscience was never lost sight of; and this could not otherwise than heighten the other characteristics of the colony--individualism." The course pursued was the natural outcome of the conditions of the times, the "outcropping of the undying love of the people of the State for democracy and liberty, and their jealousy of all authority outside their own boundaries."

"No book up to recent date," says the author of _Pantheism, the Light and Hope of Modern Reason_, who signs his name _C. Amryc_, and gives no publisher's name, "has treated pantheism as consistently as it deserves to be treated"; and he adds that "it is no creed; it is a logic; it makes absolutely no demand upon 'belief'; what is not logical is rejected, what is logical to-day is accepted, no matter whether it was unlogical a thousand years ago or will be illogical a thousand years hence; we are only responsible for our times." As pantheism, if it is a true logic, must be applicable to all races, the author has not chosen his examples from one nation or tribe; and he believes that the views he expresses are also those of nine tenths of what is called modern science. Many topics are treated of, some of which would not at first thought be associated with an exposition of pantheism. The matter and manner of the book are various. Parts of it are fairly good reading; other parts strike us as different.

A book on _The Principles of Agriculture_, prepared by Prof. _L. H. Bailey_ as a text-book for schools and rural societies, is published as a number of the Rural Science Series of the Macmillan Company ($1.25). In it agriculture is treated as a business, not a science, but as a business which is aided at every point by a knowledge of science. "It is on the science side that the experimenter is able to help the farmer. On the business side the farmer must rely upon himself, for the person who is not a good business man can not be a good farmer, however much he may know of science." The principle of the intelligent application of knowledge is illustrated in a remark of the author's about the treating of drainage. The learner is apt to begin at the wrong end of his problem. In the usual method the pupil or reader is first instructed in methods of laying drains. "But drainage is not the unit. The real unit is texture and moisture of soils--plowing, draining, green cropping, are methods of producing a given or desired result. The real subject-matter for first consideration, therefore, is amelioration of soil, rather than laying of drains." Professor Bailey aims throughout this book to get at "the real subject-matter for first consideration" in matters relating to soils, the plant and crops, and the animals and stock.

_Ideals and Programmes_ (C. W. Bardeen, Syracuse, N. Y., 75 cents) is a collection of thoughtful and suggestive essays, by _Jean L. Gourdy_, on the practical side of school life and the teaching of children. The author's ideal seems to be that the teacher should have a plan for her work, preparing for it so as to have the whole course marked out on general lines for the entire school year. Thus, her occupation should be to qualify herself for doing the work right. These statements of general principles are followed by essays on reading and plans for teaching, correlation as "the headstone of the corner of successful teaching, geography, sand modeling, field lessons, kindergarten training, and discipline." The burden of the whole is by skillful adaptation to get the best possible out of every lesson, in which a liberal use of field work assists greatly, and above all to avoid the stiff, formal, juiceless lessons of the old style of teaching.

There have been several biographies of Faraday, most of them now out of print; but the life, work, methods, character, and aims of the man--who was "beyond all question the greatest scientific expositor of his time"--can not be kept too constantly or too long before the minds of students. Welcome, therefore, is the easily accessible and convenient volume _Michael Faraday: His Life and Work_, which has been prepared by Prof. _Sylvanus P. Thompson_, and is published by the Macmillan Company in their Century Science Series ($1.25). The work by which Faraday contributed so much to the advancement of knowledge is made prominent, and is illustrated largely, due regard being had to the limitations of the size of the book, with citations from his own journal and copies of his drawings.

In _American Indians_, a book second in order but first in date of publication of a series of "Ethno-Geographic Readers" (D. C. Heath & Co., Boston), Prof. _Frederick Starr_ has succeeded in conveying a large amount of information about our aborigines in a very small space, and has done it in a clear style and a very satisfactory manner. The book is intended as a reading book for boys and girls in school, to whose tastes and capacity it seems well adapted; but the author will be pleased if it also interests older readers, and hopes it may enlarge their sympathy with our native Americans. Besides the accounts of the tribal divisions, general customs, manner of life, houses, and institutions--which when they are counted up are found to be quite numerous--it has articles on the sign language, medicine men and secret societies, the mounds and their builders, George Catlin and his work, the cliff-dwellings and ruins of the Southwest, the tribes of the Northwest coast, matters of religious and mythological significance, the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the ruined cities of Yucatan and Central America.

The revision, for the fifth edition, of _H. Newell Martin's The Human Body_ (Henry Holt & Co., New York, $1.20) was undertaken by Prof. _George Wills Fitz_ with the idea of bringing the book into accord with the late developments of physiology, of simplifying the treatment of some parts while expanding that of others, and of giving additional illustrations. Every effort has been made to avoid injuring those features of the author's work which have contributed to making the book so favorably known. The changes in the first nine chapters are largely verbal; but considerable alterations and additions have been made in some of the succeeding chapters. The directions for demonstrations and experiments have been greatly enlarged and collected into an appendix. They include the new requirements in anatomy, physiology, and hygiene for admission to Harvard College and the Lawrence Scientific School.

We have already noticed some of _Lucy S. W. Wilson's_ excellent Manuals on Nature Study, particularly the one intended for the guidance of teachers. We now have in the same line the _First Reader_ of a series on _Nature Study in Elementary Schools_ (New York: The Macmillan Company, 35 cents), a book composed of original matter and selections which has been prepared "with the desire of putting into the hands of little children literature which shall have for their minds the same interest and value that really good books have for grown-up people." But the author does not expect to accomplish this by merely giving the book to the child and leaving the reading to work out its own effect. Each of the lessons is intended to be preceded by a Nature lesson. During or after the reading a lesson should be given in the new words introduced, and afterward the lessons should be grasped for the sake of thought. The lessons, which have appropriate illustrations from Nature, present some novel features. Among them is an apparent intention in the original compositions to follow the child's method of thought.

_The American Elementary Arithmetic_ (American Book Company) is intended by the author, Prof. _M. A. Bailey_, to cover the first five years' work (beginning apparently very young) in the study, and is the first of a two-book series. It is divided into two parts--for the primary and for the three succeeding grades. It contemplates the use of apparatus, consisting of paper, pasteboard, toy money, blocks, and splints. The attempt is made to give every subject twice: first in pictures, and second in the particular form of printed words. Mathematical conceptions are presented in the first chapter in the order in which they are supposed to arise in the child's consciousness--first, once or more, indefinitely; next, how many, by holding up fingers, laying down sticks, etc.; and then by words, and so on--all introductory work designed to develop step by step a mathematical vocabulary, and to form a habit of clear mathematical thinking. The laboratory plan is followed in the succeeding chapters.

In the _Language Lessons_ of _J. G. Park_ (American Book Company) an arrangement of the matter is aimed at which will draw upon the student for such effort as may be expected at a given stage of advancement, which will cause him to think first and then to express his thought with clearness and precision. In the succeeding parts are given exercises on language work, with special drills upon capitalization and punctuation, inductive lessons in grammar, and, finally, lessons so graded that a student may advance very readily from them into the higher work of grammar. The study is facilitated by the use of striking illustrations as the basis of lessons.

The _Semi-annual Report of Schimmel and Company_ (Leipsic and New York), though primarily a business document, furnishes much information about the industries in essential oils and fine chemicals, and concerning progress in the departments of chemical science relating to these. The report for October, 1898, speaks of much research and many valuable studies as having been carried on during the preceding six months in the domain of the essential oils and their constitution, and of ample material for scientific reports as having been gathered.

PUBLICATIONS RECEIVED.

Agricultural Experiment Stations. Bulletins and Reports. Connecticut: No. 128. Commercial Feeding Stuffs. Pp. 12; No. 129. Inspection and Care of Nursery Stock. By W. E. Britton. Pp. 10. Twenty-second Annual Report, Part II, Food Products. Pp. 120.--Cornell University: No. 165. Ropiness in Milk and Cream. By A. R. Ward. Pp. 16; No. 166. Sugar-Beet Investigations for 1898. Pp. 50; No. 167. The Construction of the Stave Silo. By L. A. Clinton. Pp. 16.--Hatch Station, Massachusetts Agricultural College: No. 61. Asparagus Rust. By G. E. Stone and R. E. Smith. Pp. 20.--Iowa Agricultural College: No. 40. Relation of Acid Fermentation to Butter Flavor and Aroma. Pp. 12; No. 41. New Orchard Fruits and Shrubs. Pp. 64; No. 42. Weeds and Potato Scab. Pp. 12.--New Hampshire Agricultural College: No. 63. Third Potato Report. By F. William Ranes. Pp. 32; No. 64. The Forest Tent Caterpillar. By Clarence M. Weed. Pp. 24.--New Jersey: No. 136. Field Experiments with Nitrogenous Fertilizers. By E. B. Voorhees. Pp. 32.--New York: No. 149 (popular edition). Will Poultry thrive on Grain Alone? By F. H. Hall and W. P. Wheeler. Pp. 7; No. 151 (popular edition). How Ringing affects Grapes. By F. H. Hall and Wendell Paddock. Pp. 4; No. 152 (popular edition). Two Apple Pests and how to check them. By F. H. Hall and V. H. Lane. Pp. 8; No. 153. Director's Report for 1898. By W. H. Jordan. Pp. 36; No. 154 (popular edition). Profitable Potato Fertilizing. By F. H. Hall and W. H. Jordan. Pp. 2; No. 155 (popular edition). Sugar-Beet Success for the Season. By F. H. Hull and L. L. Van Slyke. Pp. 8.--Ohio: No. 100. The Home Mixing of Fertilizers. By C. R. Thorne. Pp. 40; No 101. Oats. By J. F. Hickman. Pp. 24; No. 102. Treatment for Insect Pests and Plant Diseases, etc. By W. J. Green and others. Sheet; No. 103. The San José Scale Problem. By F. M. Webster. Pp. 24. Newspaper Bulletin No. 192. Bovine Tuberculosis. Pp. 2.--Purdue University: No. 75. The Sugar Beet. By H. A. Husten and A. H. Bryan. Pp. 20; No. 76. Skim Milk for Young Chickens. By W. B. Anderson. Pp. 8; No. 77. Field Experiments with Corn. By W. C. Latta and W. B. Anderson. Pp. 160.--University of Illinois. Eleventh Annual Report. Pp. 16; No. 84. Spraying Apple Trees. By J. C. Blair. Pp. 36.--United States Department of Agriculture. Natural History of the Marias Islands, Mexico. By E. W. Nelson. Pp. 96.--West Virginia. Nursery Hints. By L. C. Corbett. Pp. 24.

Barber, Edwin Atlee. Anglo-American Pottery, Old English China with American Views. Indianapolis, Ind.: Press of the Clay Worker. Pp. 175.

Barrett, John. The Philippine Islands and America's Interests in the Far East. Hong-Kong. Pp. 65.

Binet, Alfred. The Psychology of Reasoning. Based on Experimental Researches In Hypnotism. Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company. Pp. 191. 75 cents.

Bridges and Framed Structures. Monthly. Vol. 1, No. 2. May, 1899. Chicago: The D. H. Ranck Publishing Company. Pp. 92, with plates. 30 cents.

Brooks, William Keith. The Foundations of Zoölogy. New York: The Macmillan Company. Pp. 339. $2.50.

Bullen, Frank T. Idylls of the Sea. With an Introduction by J. St. Loe Strachey. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 286. $1.25.

Bulletins, Reports, Transactions, etc. American Society of Civil Engineers: Proceedings. Vol. XXV. No. 4. Pp. 150.--British Columbia, Province of: Annual Report of the Minister of Mines to December 31, 1898. Pp. 280, with maps.--Chicago Manual Training School (University of Chicago): Catalogue, 1898-'99. Pp. 20.--City of Seattle, County of King, State of Washington: Report of the Chamber of Commerce. Pp. 33.--City Library Association, Springfield, Mass.: Bibliography of Geographical Instruction. By W. S. Monroe. Pp. 8.--Geographical Society of Washington: Presidential Address of Arnold Hague, Minutes for 1897 and 1898, etc. Pp. 48.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology: Annual Report of the President and Treasurer for 1898. Pp. 96, with plates; Annual Catalogue, 1898-'99. Pp. 347.--Michigan College of Mines: Catalogue, 1896 to 1898. Pp. 192.--New York Academy of Natural Sciences: Annals. Vol. XI, Part III. December 1, 1898. Pp. 230.--Ohio State University, Department of Zoölogy and Entomology, No. 1: The Odonata of Ohio. By David S. Kellicott. Pp. 116.--United States Department of Labor: No. 21. Pp. 188.--United States Life-Saving Service: Annual Report of Operations to June 30, 1898. Pp. 448.--Utah, State of: Second Biennial Report of the Superintendent of Public Instruction, to June 30, 1898. Pp. 317, with tables.--War Department of the United States: Customs Tariff and Regulations for the Philippine Islands. Pp. 40.

Burgess, O. O. A Question of Consciousness. San Francisco. Pp. 40.

Cumulative Index to a Selected List of Periodicals. Third Annual Volume, 1898. Cleveland, Ohio: The Helman-Taylor Company. Pp. 792.

Coming Age, The. A Magazine of Constructive Thought. B. O. Flower and Mrs. C. K. Reifsnider, Editors. Boston and St. Louis. Vol. I, No. 3. March, 1899. Pp. 112. 20 cents.

Eidlitz, Leopold. On Light. An Analysis of the Emersions of Jupiter's Satellite I. New York: The Knickerbocker Press. Pp. 12.

Elrod, M. J. The College, Past and Present. Bloomington, Ill.: The University Press. Pp. 26.

Fay, Edward Allen. Marriages of the Deaf in America. Washington, D. C.: The Volta Bureau. Pp. 527.

Gardiner, Charles A. Our Right to acquire and to hold Foreign Territory. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 56.

International Express Company, New York. Chart of Express Routes over the World. Sheet.

Interstate Commerce Commission. Statistics of Railways in the United States to June 30, 1897. Pp. 687.

Jacoby, Johann. The Object of the Labor Movement. Translated by Florence Kelley. New York: International Publishing Company (International Monthly Library). Pp. 36. 5 cents.

Jackson, Frederick G. A Thousand Days in the Arctic. With Preface by Admiral S. F. Leopold McClintock. New York: Harper & Brothers. Pp. 940.

Jordan, David Starr, with Official Associates and Special Contributors. The Fur Seals and Fur-Seal Islands of the North Pacific Ocean. In Two Parts. Washington: Government Printing Office. Pp. 606, with plates.

Krüger, F. C. Theo. A Step Forward, A Treatise on Possible Social Reform. New York: Isaac H. Blanchard & Co. Pp. 30.

Lucas, Fred Alexander. The Hermit Naturalist. Trenton, N. J.: William Hibbert. Pp. 121.

McLaughin, Andrew C. A History of the American Nation. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 587. $1.40.

Marsh, O. C. The Dinosaurs of North America. United States Geological Survey. Pp. 112, with 84 plates.

Marshall, Percival. Small Accumulators, How Made and Used. New York: Spon and Chamberlain. Pp. 78. 50 cents.

Michigan Ornithological Club, The. Bulletin of, Monthly. Vol. III, No. 1. January, 1899. Grand Rapids, Mich. 50 cents a year.

Moon, Clarence B. Certain Aboriginal Mounds on the Coast of South Carolina. (Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.) Pp. 40, with plates.

Moses, Alfred J. The Characters of Crystals. An Introduction to Practical Crystallography. New York: D. Van Nostrand Company. Pp. 211. $2.

Munro, John. The Story of the British Race. (Library of Useful Stories.) New York: D. Appleton and Company. Pp. 228. 40 cents.

Palmer, Frederick. In the Klondyke. Including an Account of a Winter's Journey to Dawson. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Pp. 218. $1.50.

Porter, Robert P. Industrial Cuba, Being a Study of Present Commercial and Industrial Conditions, etc. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 428. $3.50.

Reprints. Bolin, Jacob. On Group Contests. Pp. 14.--Coulter, John M. Notes on the Fertilization and Embryology of Conifers. Pp. 4, with plates.--Grabau, Amadeus W. Moniloperidæ, A New Family of Palæozoic Corals. Pp. 16, with 4 plates.--Hunter, S. J. The Coccidæ of Kansas. II. Pp. 12, with 6 plates.--Oliver, Charles A. The Value of Repeated and Differently Placed Exposures to the Roentgen Rays in determining the Location of Foreign Bodies in and about the Eyeball. Pp. 4.--Tyson, James, M. D., Philadelphia. The Uric-Acid Diathesis from a Clinical Standpoint. Pp. 15.--Washburn, F. L. Hermaphroditism in Ostrea Lurida. Pp. 3.

The Sanitary Home. A Magazine devoted to Foods, Hygiene, and University Extension Work. Monthly. Fargo, North Dakota. Pp. 24. 10 cents. $1 a year.

Schimmel & Co., Leipsic and New York. Semi-annual Report (Essential Oils, etc.). April, 1899. Pp. 68.

Smith, D. T. Philosophy of Memory, and other Essays. Louisville, Ky.: John P. Morton & Co. Pp. 203.

Smithsonian Institution. Crookes, William. Diamonds. Pp. 16.--Nutting, J. C. Hydroida from Alaska and Puget Sound. Pp. 12, with plates.

Todd, David P. Stars and Telescopes. A Handy Book of Astronomy. Boston: Little, Brown & Co. Pp. 419. $2.

Wetterstrand, Otto Georg. Hypnotism and its Application to Practical Medicine. Authorized Translation. By Henrik G. Petersen. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons. Pp. 166.

Wilkensen, H. E., Acting Secretary, and French, H. A., Acting Secretary. An Earnest Word to Our Friends. Portland, Oregon. (Home Making there.)

Woodhull, John F., and Van Arsdale, M. B. Chemical Experiments. New York: Henry Holt & Co. Pp. 136.

Fragments of Science.

=The Gypsies and their Folk Tales.=--In the introduction to his collection of Gypsy Folk Tales Mr. Francis H. Groome describes the wide dispersion of the gypsy race as extending, in Europe, from Finland to Sicily, and from the shores of the Bosporus to the Atlantic seaboard; in Asia, from Siberia to India, and from Asia Minor (possibly) to China; in Africa, from Egypt and Algeria to Darfúr and Kordofan; and in America, from Pictou in Canada to Rio Janeiro. Believing that the gypsies, originating in India, left that region at an unknown date very long ago, he traces their migrations in the past and shows that a part of the race is still very migratory, passing, among other routes, between Scotland and North America, and between Spain and Louisiana. Another migration not mentioned in his book is the annual oscillation between north and south of the North American gypsy colony, which is growing healthily. The author finds it at present quite impossible to fix the arrival of the gypsies in southeastern Europe at a thousand years before Christ or a thousand years after. If the Komodromoi of the Byzantine writers were gypsies, then these people must have been a recognized and familiar element of the Balkan population about as early as the latter date. Gypsies pass for a very cunning people, and such they are to outsiders, so that Romany or gypsy guile is a very common expression. Centuries of suspicion and repression have taught them to arm themselves proof against confidence in strangers; but to those who become acquainted with them, as Mr. Groome professes to have done and George Borrow did, they present a character of simplicity and frankness. There is, as a gypsy woman once said to a writer in The Athenæum, "somethin' in the mind of a Gorgio that shuts the Romany's mouth and opens his eyes and ears." Gypsies are active transmitters of folklore, and have rich funds of stories; and many believe that the folklore stories of Europe are traceable to Indian sources, whence they may have been transmitted to Europe. Mr. Groome suggests how some of these stories may have originated by telling of a gypsy girl he knew who dashed off "what was almost a folk tale impromptu." She had been to a picnic in a four-in-hand with "a lot of real tiptop gentry," and "Reia," she said to me afterward, "I'll tell you the comicallest thing as ever was. We'd pulled up to put the brake on, and there was a _puro hotchiwitchi_ (old hedgehog) come and looked at us through the hedge, looked at me hard. I could see he'd his eye upon me. And home he'd go, that old hedgehog, to his wife, and 'Missus,' he'd say, 'what d'ye think? I seen a little gypsy gal just now in a coach and four horses,' and 'Dabla,' she'd say, 'bless us, every one now keeps a carriage.'"

=Educational Work of an Experiment Station.=--The survey of the year's work of Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station in its efforts to "help the farmer" by dealing with present-day problems includes mention of its investigations, related in bulletins published or to be published in reference to fruits, their insect and fungoid enemies, vegetables, flowers, sugar beets, potatoes, fertilizers, beans, the dairy, veterinary science, horticulture, and plant disease. Much of the work of the station can not be published, consisting as it does of correspondence, personal advice, attending meetings, making records, or the performance of special illustrative experiments at farmers' homes or in neighborhoods as object lessons. "It is a pity," the report says, "that every farmer in the State can not be personally touched at least once in his life by the methods and the inspiration of a good teacher." The itinerant schools which were held in the early days of the extension work are regarded as being most beneficial when the community has been awakened by simpler and more elementary means, while the larger part of the work can be done more economically than by them. Yet in particular places and cases they are of greatest value, and they are still held when suitable conditions prevail. Special dairy schools, largely of the nature of practical demonstrations, were held at various places. The report lays much stress on the importance of beginning the educational work with the children and upon the value of Nature study. More than sixteen thousand school children have requested and been supplied with information on the making of gardens.

=Flies as Bearers of Disease.=--In estimating the relative importance of flies and water supply in spreading disease, Dr. M. A. Veeder distinguishes between intestinal and malarial disorders. In the former the infection is a bacillus of some sort, the presence of which can be traced to contamination by excretions from a diseased bowel. In the latter the source of infection is peculiar to marshy or stagnant water, and independent of contamination from human sources. It is the author's belief that, with relatively unimportant exceptions, intestinal diseases are spread almost exclusively by flies and malarial diseases by water, and he supports it by citations from recent army experiences. Likewise, during the recent British campaign in Fashoda, which was most carefully planned and took place in a climate that is exceptionally dry and hygienic, there was no abatement of typhoid fever. In the case of an outbreak of malignant dysentery described by the author in a previous paper, taken at its height, not a new case occurred after measures were adopted that made conveyance by flies impossible, although there had been fresh ones every day for some time previously. Another more recent "lively epidemic" of typhoid mentioned by the author was ended in a day by measures directed against conveyance by water. "When flies are responsible, there are little neighborhood epidemics, extending in short leaps from house to house, without reference to water supply or anything else in common. But when water is at fault the disease follows its use wherever it may go.... Epidemics spread by flies tend to follow the direction of prevailing warm winds, as though the fly, wandering outdoors after contact with the source of infection, had drifted with the wind, but nothing of the sort is perceptible in the case of water-borne disease."

=Pottery Making and Lead Poisoning.=--The report of Professors Thorpe and Oliver on the subject of the employment of compounds of lead in the manufacture of pottery, especially in its relation to the health of the work people, has just been issued as an English blue book. It appears that of the total male workers in the year 1898, 4.9 per cent became "leaded," while of the female workers the proportion was 12.4 per cent. It is stated that in the last six months many successful attempts have been made by the manufacturers to substitute a leadless glaze, and there seems no doubt that glazes of sufficient brilliancy, covering power, and durability are now within the reach of the manufacturer. The exclusion of women from certain parts of the work, except where leadless glazes are used, is advocated, and also various expedients for preventing the absorption of the lead by the skin, such as rubber gloves or "dipping" tongs. Their general conclusions are as follows: "That by far the greater amount of earthenware of the class already specified can be glazed without the use of lead in any form. It has been demonstrated, without the slightest doubt, that the ware so made is in no respects inferior to that coated with lead glaze. There seems no reason, therefore, why in the manufacture of this class of goods the operatives should still continue to be exposed to the evils which the use of lead glaze entails. There are, however, certain branches of the pottery industry in which it would be more difficult to dispense with the use of lead compounds. But there is no reason why, in these cases, the lead so employed should not be in the form of a fritted double silicate. Such a compound, if properly made, is but slightly attacked by even strong hydrochloric, acetic, or lactic acid. There can be little doubt that, if lead must be used, the employment of such a compound silicate--if its use could be insured--would greatly diminish the evil of lead poisoning. The use of raw lead as an ingredient of glazing material, or as an ingredient of colors which have to be subsequently fired, should be absolutely prohibited. As it would be very difficult to insure that an innocuous lead glaze shall be employed, we are of opinion that young persons and women should be excluded from employment as dippers, dippers' assistants, ware cleaners after dippers, and glost placers in factories where lead glaze is used, and that the adult male dippers, dippers' assistants, ware cleaners, and glost placers should be subjected to systematic medical inspection. In the 1893 report the medical members of the committee expressed the opinion that 'many old factories are wholly, or in part, unfit in a sanitary point of view for occupation,' and they suggested that 'there should be some authority to close them, or whatever part of them is condemned, on the same principle as dwellings are declared uninhabitable.' We share this opinion and we concur in the suggestion. Certain of the factories we have inspected are in the last stages of dilapidation, and it appears to us to be well-nigh impossible to introduce into them such rearrangements or additions as are required by the amended special rules."

=The Longevity of Animals.=--The following interesting table, showing the periods of maturity and the full term of life of various animals, was prepared by E. D. Bell and appeared in Nature for March 23d. The table was made for the purpose of demonstrating a constant relation (in length) between these two periods of life, which the author expresses in the following formula, in which f. t. l. = full term of life, and p. m. the time required to arrive at maturity:

f. t. l. = 10.5(p. m.) / [3root](p. m.), or 10.5 × (p. m.)^{2/3}

and which seems to be fairly well borne out by the table:

----------+-----------------------------------+---------- | OBSERVATIONS. | f. t. l. ANIMAL. |-----------------+---------+-------| by | Authority. | p. m. | f.t.l | formula. ----------+-----------------+---------+-------+---------- | |Mos. Yr. | Yrs. | Years. Dormouse | Ainslie Hollis. | 3 .25 | 4-5 | 4.167 Guinea-pig| Flourens. | 7 .583 | 6-7 | 7.33 Loprabbit:| | | | Buck | R. O. Edwards, | | | | p. m. | 9 .75 | 8 | 8.67 Doe | R. O. Edwards, | | | | p. m. | 8 .667 | 8 | 8.013 | | Years. | | Cat | St. G. Mivart. | 1 | 12 | 10.5 Cat | J. Jennings. | 2 | 15 | 16.67 Goat | Pegler. | 1.25 | 12 | 12.18 Fox | St. G. Mivart. | 1.5 | 13-14 | 13.76 Cattle | Ainslie Hollis. | 2 | 18 | 16.67 Large dogs| Dalziel, p. m. | 2 | 15-20 | 16.67 Eng. thor-| | | | oughbred | | | | horse | Ainslie Hollis. | 4.5 | 30 | 28.62 Hog | James Long. | 5 | 30 | 30.7 Hippopot- | | | | amus | Chambers's | | | | Encyclopædia. | 5 | 30 | 30.7 Lion | St. G. Mivart. | 6 | 30-40 | 34.67 Eng. horse| | | | --hunter | Blaine. | 6.25 | 35 | 35.63 Arab horse| Ainslie Hollis. | 8 | 40 | 42.00 Camel | Flourens. | 8 | 40 | 42.00 Man | Buffon, f. t. l.| 25 | 90-100| 89.77 Elephant | Darwin. | 30 | 100 |101.4 Elephant | C. F. Holder | | | | and Indian | | | | hunters. | 35 | 120 |112.35 ----------+-----------------+---------+-------+----------

=The Manufacture of Firecrackers in China.=--There were exported from China during the year ending June 30, 1897, 26,705,733 pounds of firecrackers, all from the province of Kwantung. The exports, however, represent only a small portion of the number manufactured, as the use of the cracker is universal all over China. They are used at weddings, births, funerals, at festivals, religious and civil, and in fact on all occasions out of the ordinary routine. The United States consul general at Shanghai gives the following account of the industry: There are no large factories; the crackers are made in small houses and in the shops where they are sold. In making them only the cheapest kind of straw paper is used for the body of the cracker. A little finer paper is used for the wrapper. A piece of straw paper, nine by thirty inches, will make twenty-one crackers an inch and a half long and a quarter inch in diameter. The powder is also of the cheapest grade, and is made in the locality where used. It costs about six cents per pound. For the fuse a paper (called "leather" in Shanghai) is used, which is imported from Japan, and is made from the inner lining of the bamboo. In other places a fine rice paper is used, generally stiffened slightly with buckwheat-flour paste, which the Chinese say adds to its inflammability. A strip of this paper one third of an inch wide by fourteen inches (a Chinese foot) long is laid on a table, and a very little powder put down the middle of it with a hollow bamboo stick. A quick twist of the paper makes the fuse ready for use. The straw paper is first rolled by hand around an iron rod, which varies in size according to the size of cracker to be made. To complete the rolling a rude machine is used. This consists of two uprights supporting an axis from which is suspended, by two arms, a heavy piece of wood, slightly convex on the lower side. There is just room between this swinging block and top of the table to place the cracker. As each layer of paper is put on by hand, the cracker is placed on the table and the suspended weight is drawn over the roll, thus tightening it until no more can be passed under the weight. For the smallest "whip" crackers, the workman uses for compression, instead of this machine, a heavy piece of wood fitted with a handle like that of a carpenter's plane. In filling crackers, two hundred to three hundred are tightly tied together in a bunch; red clay is spread over the end of the bunch, and forced into the end of each cracker with a punch. While the clay is being treated a little water is sprayed on it, which makes it pack closer. The powder is poured in at the other end of the cracker. With the aid of an awl the edge of the paper is turned in at the upper end of the cracker, and the fuse is inserted through this. The long ends of the fuses are braided together in such a way that the crackers lie in two parallel rows. The braid is doubled on itself, and a large, quick-firing fuse inserted, and the whole is bound with a fine thread. The bundle is wrapped in paper and in this shape is sent to the seacoast. A variety of cracker which is very popular in China is the "twice-sounding" cracker; it has two chambers, separated by a plug of clay, through which runs a connecting fuse. There is also a fuse extending from the powder in the lower chamber through the side of the cracker. When the cracker is to be fired, it is set on end and fire applied to the fuse. The powder exploding in the chamber throws the cracker high in the air, where the second charge is exploded by fire from the fuse extending through the plug between the two chambers. In the manufacture of these the clay is first packed in with a punch to form the separating plug. The lower chamber is then loaded with powder and closed by turning over the paper at the end. The upper chamber is loaded and closed with clay. A hole is punched in the side of the lower chamber with an awl, and the fuse inserted through this opening.

=An Enchanted Ravine.=--During his archæological researches in the Uloa Valley, Honduras (Memoirs of Peabody Museum), Mr. George Byron Gordon made an excursion to the wonderful enchanted ravine, _Quebrada Encantada_, which was famous through all the country for its weather wisdom. It was situated in a deep valley, and, Mr. Gordon says, "sends forth a loud melodious sound which may be heard many miles away, and is regarded by the people of the region as an infallible sign of rain. In fact, it is a regular weather bureau, with this peculiarity, that it is always reliable; for the sound is so modulated as to indicate by its pitch whether the coming storm is to be heavy or light. The amount of promised rain is in exact proportion to the volume of the sound, and thus it proclaims to the accustomed ear with unerring precision the approach of a passing shower or heralds the terrific thunderstorm of the tropics; and this is no fiction, but a fact, which any one may demonstrate for himself by going and listening to it." Tradition says the ravine was the abode of a golden dragon, and that in former times "it was lined with golden pebbles and the sands at its margin were grains of gold, and it was the custom of the golden dragon to rise occasionally to the margin of the pool and receive the offerings that were made to him by the people. If they wanted rain, they would bring their offerings and lay them on the golden sand behind the pool or cast them on the water; then, while all the people chanted a prayer, the dragon would rise from the cave where he dwelt in the depths of the pool, and take the good things that were offered him, and there was never a drought or a famine in the land. Then, when the Spaniards came and the people were driven from their homes, the golden pebbles and grains of gold disappeared, and the golden dragon, retiring into the uttermost corner of his watery cavern, withdrew forever from the upper world. There he still lives, and, as formerly, controls the clouds and the winds that bring the rain. The spirits of the Indians, too, still hold their meetings of an occasional evening by their accustomed pool, now lost in the solitude of the forest, and it is the sound of their chanting that makes the voice of the ravine." The pool is formed by a cataract tumbling down the side of the mountain and making a final fall of fifty feet, and the sound of the tumbling of the waters forms the basis of the pretty legend.

=The Work of the Field Columbian Museum.=--Making only a selection from the numerous items of general interest in the Annual Report of the Director of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago, for 1897-'98, we find mentioned the fall and spring courses of nine lectures each, as having been more largely attended than ever before, hundreds of persons having been turned away from some of them, and in one case nearly a thousand. The library contains 9,003 books and 9,630 pamphlets, and has had some valuable additions, particularly in the department of Americana. The additions to the collections include specimens from Egypt, Italy (ancient Etruscan and renaissance Venetian), Portuguese South Africa, Pacific islands, and Alaska, the department representing which now numbers more than ten thousand objects. Valuable contributions have been received from the expedition of the curator of the anthropological (physical) department to Arizona. The herbarium of the late Mr. M. S. Bebb, added to the botanical department, represents much of the flora of the Western States, and "about all" that of Illinois. Numerous other botanical collections and additions to the geological and zoölogical departments are mentioned. Field work was prosecuted by Mr. G. A. Dorsey among the Hopi Indians in Arizona, C. F. Millspaugh in the collection of North American forest trees, and O. C. Farrington in the Tertiary geology of South Dakota, Nebraska, and Wyoming. Other excursions were made among the zinc-lead deposits of southeast Missouri, to the Olympian Mountains of the Northwest, to "a point beyond which nothing unless provided with wings could go," etc., all resulting in collections of one kind or another. The museum was visited by 3,963 more persons than in the year before.

=A Year at Harvard Observatory.=--The director of Harvard College Observatory reports the addition to the resources of the institution of twenty thousand dollars bequeathed by Charlotte Maria Haven, and twenty-five thousand dollars by Eliza Appleton Haven, without further restriction in the application of the income than that it shall be for direct purposes connected with astronomical science. In these bequests the legators fulfilled the wishes of their brother, Horace Appleton Haven, as expressed half a century ago. By the peculiar organization of the force of the observatory, with a single director to oversee all and a large force of assistants, each having a special work and many of them skillful only in that, an increased amount of work can be done for a given expenditure, and great advantages for co-operation are secured, but too much depends upon a single person--the director. In the examination of the spectra of stars photographed in the Draper, Bruce, and Bache telescopes by Mrs. Fleming, twelve new variable stars were discovered by means of their bright hydrogen lines, and the spectra of a considerable number of other stars were determined. Valuable results, obtained by other examiners, are mentioned. An instrument has been constructed by which prismatic spectra can be converted into normal spectra or any other desired change of scale can be effected. By photographs obtained of stars in the vicinity of the north pole material is believed to be furnished for an accurate determination of the constants of aberration, nutation, and precession. Sixteen circulars were issued during 1897-'98. When fifty of these circulars have been issued, a title-page and index are to be published for binding.

=Putting Life in the School.=--The discussion of the hygiene of instruction, said Dr. G. W. Fitz, in addresses which are published in the American Physical Education Review, brings us at once face to face with one of the gravest problems of our educational system--the depressing effect of school routine. In the search for a remedy "the school programme has been pronounced poor, and efforts have been made to enrich it. The work has been pronounced abstract and object lessons have been introduced; uninteresting and bright colors, varied shapes, pictures innumerable, have been rushed upon the child until he has been bewildered by the multiplicity of detail, and further exhausted by the demand for more discriminating attention. The fundamental difficulty has been that too much has been required of the child in the beginning, and the attempt at enrichment and greater variety has but increased the burden." Children begin learning to read before they have acquired experience and ideas to match the text; and "experience has shown over and over again that the child who begins to read at eight or even ten years of age is in no wise handicapped in his later intellectual progress. He has the inestimable advantage of intense interest, roused by his growing ability to unlock the secrets of books and papers after the fashion of his elders." Writing is taught before the child has acquired the art of fine co-ordination, and the effort demanded in the use of the pen "leads to a degree of nervous exhaustion unapproached by any other school work." In arithmetic the children "are unable to grasp the numerical relations involved, and the drill, which makes it a pure exercise of memory, is necessary. Much of the aversion to arithmetical problems found later is undoubtedly due to this disheartening primary work. Here again the child who begins arithmetic at eight or ten years of age finds himself able to take it up quickly and has the liking for it that easy mastery always gives." Nature work, on the other hand, "offers wonderfully interesting and valuable material for awakening the intellectual activities of childhood, and while its material for study and description is unlimited, its demand upon the child may be perfectly adapted to his power of observation. We must remember that physical activity is the supreme factor in the development of the child." This means spontaneous play under favorable conditions, not "that nervously exhausting and deadening drill known as the Swedish gymnastics, which ... adds fatigue to fatigue, by taking the initiative away from the child and forcing him to pay constant attention to the orders of the teacher." As to discipline, "the child is self-disciplined when he is held to his work by the reflex attention of interest. This can always be secured when the work is adapted to his grasp, when he has the sense of power which comes with easy conquest, when he is not exhausted by the imposition of a sequence logical to the adult mind but meaningless to him, when his attention is not dulled by a demand for attention continued beyond a physiological limit."

=Beautifying the Home Grounds.=--The Horticultural Division of the Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station has been making efforts during the past few years, under the auspices of the agricultural extension work, to improve the surroundings of rural houses, a part of which consists in the publication of bulletins giving hints as to how improved conditions and simple adornments may be obtained without great expense. One of these indicates as one of the means of making the home attractive and "keeping the boy on the farm" the brightening of the place with flowers. Assuming that the main planting of any place should be of trees and shrubs, the flowers are then used as decorations. They may be thrown in freely about the borders of the place, but not in beds in the center of the lawn. They show off better when seen against a background, which may be foliage, a building, a rock, or a fence. "Where to plant flowers is really more important than what to plant. In front of bushes, in the corner by the steps, against the foundation of the residence or outhouse, along a fence or walk--these are places for flowers. A single petunia plant against a background of foliage is worth a dozen similar plants in the center of the lawn.... The open-centered yard may be a picture; the promiscuously planted yard may be a nursery or a forest. A little color scattered in here and there puts a finish to the picture. A dash of color gives spirit and character to the brook or pond, to the ledge of rocks, to the old stump, or to the pile of rubbish." The flower garden, if there is one, should be at one side of the residence or at the rear, "for it is not allowable to spoil a good lawn even with flowers."

MINOR PARAGRAPHS.

Of the twelve genera and fifty species of known North American frogs and toads, Mr. William L. Sherwood says, in his paper in the Proceedings of the Linnæan Society, New York, that five genera and fifty species are found in the vicinity of New York city. Some of these are less secretive in habit than salamanders, and therefore much better known. As ponds and ditches have been drained, the aquatic forms have removed to greater distances from human dwellings, and only the more terrestrial toad and arboreal tree frogs have remained. All of our species have been described, but the author believes that the first mention of the cricket frog being found in this region is in a paper on salamanders, read by him in 1895. The breeding habits of these animals vary, but all lay their eggs in water or moist places. The purely amphibious and really aquatic species are three. Of the other eight species, one is burrowing, five tend to be terrestrial, inhabiting the woods and fields, and two are arboreal. The eggs are laid in gelatinous envelopes, which swell after leaving the adult. At the time of hatching the young tadpole has three pairs of external gills, but no mouth or anal opening. Two small suckers, just back of where the mouth is to appear, enable it to cling to aquatic plants and prevent its dropping to the bottom of the pond and getting smothered in the mud. It soon develops into a tadpole, and proceeds to its development; but if prevented from coming to the surface of the water no metamorphosis takes place, and the changes are delayed by cold and dark.

At a meeting recently held in Berlin in behalf of a German antarctic exploration, Dr. von Drygalski, speaking of the scientific, practical, and national importance of the enterprise, said that from a geographical point of view the fundamental problem attached to the south polar region--the verification or disproof of a polar continent--is still unsolved. No less important questions likewise await solution with respect to the geological structure and character of the southern lands--so important in connection with a knowledge of volcanic action and the supposed former connection of South America and Australia--and with respect to the conditions of inland ice. Even the study of the floating ice broken away from the main mass may lead to important conclusions as to its mode of origin and the nature of the land from which it comes. Other problems to be investigated are the origin of the cold ocean currents that take their rise in the south, the conditions of the atmospheric pressure and temperature in that region, and the questions relating to terrestrial magnetism, which have a very important bearing on the practice of navigation. The present seems to be a particularly favorable period for the resumption of south polar research by reason of the unusual amount of drift ice which has within the last few years broken away from the main mass, and because, according to Supan, we are passing through a warmer temperature period.

Over and above the statistics and the bare record of facts the annual reports of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind afford a continuous and growing interest to friends of suffering mankind in their stories of the development of mental life and illumination. Pupils come there blind and deaf, and apparently without any avenues of intelligent communication with the outer world, and are there brought to full consciousness and keenness of intellect that would be remarked even in many persons possessed of all their senses perfect from birth. The record began with Laura Bridgman, was continued with Helen Keller, and has been occupied for five or six years past with the wonderful mental growth of Elizabeth Robin, Edith M. Thomas, and Tommy Stringer. Before Dr. Howe began with Laura Bridgman, such things would have been deemed impossible and not to be thought of.

NOTES.

The Swiss Association for the Protection of Plants, which was formed in Geneva in 1883, has more than 900 members, and publishes 1,500 copies of its bulletin, which is sent, besides the members of the association, to the libraries of foreign Alpine clubs, the press, botanists, _curés_, and municipalities in countries harboring plants that require protection. Under its care, or the influence of its work, gardens have been created in various places and devoted especially to the cultivation of such plants as are most threatened with extinction. Of these are the Linnea Garden in the Valais, 5,500 feet above the sea; the Chanousia, founded five years ago by R. P. Chanoux, rector of the Hospice of St. Bernard, 6,800 feet; and the Rambertia, at the foot of the Rochers de Naye, 6,500 feet above the Lake of Geneva. Lectures are given under the auspices of the association, and no occasion for informing the public is lost. A neat chromo-poster calling attention to the association and its purpose has been prepared to be put up in railroad stations and hotels, to which is appended a motto emphasizing the importance of caring for rare plants.

The report of Heinrich Ries on the Kaolins and Fire Clays of Europe, published in the reports of the Geological Survey, is based largely on notes collected by the author during visits in 1897 to most of the important kaolin and clay deposits. To these such facts of importance concerning the clays as have already been published have been added. Some manufacturers have claimed that the foreign kaolins are superior to the American, but the evidence, Mr. Ries says, does not seem to bear out the statements. Notes are added respecting the clays and clay-working industries in the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, New York, and North Carolina.

According to the report of the _Commission Internationale des Glaciers_ for 1897, thirty-nine out of fifty-six glaciers observed in Switzerland are retreating, five are at a standstill, and twelve are growing. Of the Italian glaciers, those of the Disgrazia and Bernina groups and the glaciers of Mont Canin in the Julian Alps show a marked retreat. Retreat seems to be almost universal in the Scandinavian glaciers. The report includes also information from the Caucasus, Altai, and Turkestan, and notes on a few glaciers in the United States and Mexico, concerning which we have not the particulars.

In a book on social types among the French people, M. Edmond Demolins tries to show that varieties of types are the products of constant causes which it is possible to analyze exactly, and the most fundamental principle of which is the nature of the place and of the occupation. Thus there is a social type derived from the pastoral occupation; another from the cultivation of fruit trees, among which the several classes determine as many modalities of the type; one is derived from petty gardening, and another from large farming; another from manufacturing, and another from transportation and commerce. Close analysis permits the detection of still more delicate shades of types of varieties in each of the categories named, whereby notable modifications are produced in the same region and the same work.

The brewing industry in Germany is credited with the following output of beer for the year 1897-'98: Germany proper, 8,055 breweries, exclusive of Bavaria, Würtemberg, Baden, and Alsace-Lorraine, 916,000,000 gallons; Bavaria, 6,364 breweries, 351,000,000 gallons; Würtemberg, 6,285 breweries, 90,000,000 gallons; Baden, 946 breweries, 60,000,000 gallons; Alsace-Lorraine, 127 breweries, 21,230,000 gallons--a grand total of 1,438,230,000 gallons, from the taxation of which the Government received a revenue of $22,305,150.

Speaking in his society of the Relation of Britain to Folklore, retiring President Alfred Nutt urged that it was the privilege of that country to enshrine in its literature the ancient customary wisdom of many races, as the English system of law was itself largely derived from custom. The accidents of the geographical position and historical circumstances of Britain had made it the preserver of a great body of archaic tradition, which it was the function of the Folklore Society to study and interpret.

We have to record the deaths of Dr. William Hankel, Professor of Physics in the University of Leipsic; Prof. F. K. C. L. Büchner, author of the famous book, Force and Matter, at Darmstadt, Germany, May 1st; Dr. Francis W. MacNamara, State Examiner of Medical Stores at the India Office, London, formerly Professor of Chemistry in Calcutta Medical College, and later Chemical Examiner to the Government of India, March 5th, aged sixty-seven years; he was author of a number of books and papers on hygiene and medical chemistry; Jeremiah Head, engineer, President of the Mechanical Science Section of the British Association in 1893, and President of the British Institute of Mechanical Engineers in 1885-'86, March 10th, aged sixty-four years; who was instrumental in introducing into England important American improvements in the manufacture of iron and steel; Franz Ritter von Hanse, Austrian geologist, Intendant of the National Museum in Vienna, Director of the Imperial Geological Survey in 1866, and author of the Geological Map of Austria, Bosnia, and Montenegro, and of geological books, March 20th, aged seventy-seven years; Surveyor Major G. C. Wallich, March 31st, in his eighty-fourth year, and Count Abbé F. Castracan, of Rome, the two oldest Fellows of the Royal Microscopical Society; Dr. P. L. Ryke, of the University of Leyden, aged eighty-six years; Joseph Stevens, honorary curator of the museum at Reading, England, author of archæological and geological papers; Dr. C. Brogniart, entomologist, and author of a memoir On Fossil Insects of the Primary Period, at Paris; Charles L. Prince, author of papers on meteorology and astronomy, at Tunbridge Wells, England, April 22d; Dr. Wilhelm Jordan, Professor of Geometry and Geodesy at the Technical Institution, Hanover, April 17th, aged fifty-seven years; Sir William Roberts, of the Royal College of Physicians, author of lectures and papers on digestion, diet, uric acid, the opium habit in India, etc.; Prof. Karl Scheibler, chemist, at Berlin, aged seventy-two years; Dr. Josef Wastler, docent in geodesy at the Technical Institute in Graz; Dr. H. A. Wahlforso, Professor of Chemistry at Helsingfors, aged sixty years; and Philip Thomas Main, Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, England, author of a treatise on astronomy.

Transcriber's Notes:

Words surrounded by _ are italicized.

Words surrounded by = are bold.

Obvious printer's errors have been repaired, other inconsistent spellings have been kept, including inconsistent use of hyphen (e.g. "widespread" and "wide-spread"), and proper names (e.g. "Siddânta" and "Siddhânta").

Some illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text.