Chapter 10

On the way down the river another party, composed of Messrs. Bryant and Kenaston of Philadelphia, was met, who were on the same business as the Bowdoin party, the discovery of the falls. Mr. Bryant handed to Mr. Young a twenty-five pound can of flour, which, he said, he had found in the whirlpool below the first falls. It had been in the boat which was overturned in the Horseshoe Rapids, and had made the journey to the first falls, a distance of over fifty miles, without denting or injuring the can in any way. It was a great relief to the Bryant party to learn the cause of the mishap, as they had feared a more serious calamity.

After the departure of the other two, Messrs. Cary and Cole encountered much rapid water, so that their progress was necessarily slow. On the third day, when they had proceeded sixty-five miles above Lake Waminikapon, and had seen no indications of any falls, the rapidity of the current forced them to leave the river and make any further progress on foot. The boat was cached at this point, together with all that was left of provisions and instruments except the compass and food for six days. They left just enough provisions to carry them to their last cache at Ninipi River, and hoped, by careful use of the remainder, to find the object of their search. If they had not enough provisions, then they must turn back, leaving reports of falls as destitute of confirmation as ever.

The land bordering the river at this point was heavily wooded, and in places where the river shore could not be followed on account of the cliffs, their progress was necessarily slow. Finding an elevation of land at no great distance from them, they ascended it for a general survey of the country. Far away in the distance could be seen the current of the Grand River flowing sluggishly but majestically on its course to the sea. Lakes on all sides were visible, most of them probably of glacial origin. Descending from this mountain, which the explorers christened Mount Bowdoin, a course was laid on the river bank, where camp was made that night. Being now somewhat weak from hard labor and insufficient food, their progress was slow through the thick wood, but on the next night camp was made on the edge of the plateau or table land of Labrador.

After proceeding a short distance on the next day, Aug. 13, a loud roar was heard in the distance, and a course was laid for the river at the nearest point. The river at this point, about one mile above the falls, was 500 yards wide, narrowing to fifty yards a short distance below, where great clouds of spray floating in the air warned the weary travelers that their object had been attained. Quickly they proceeded to the scene, and a magnificent sight burst upon their view.

Grand Falls, though not approaching the incredible height attributed to it by legendary accounts of the Indians, is a grand fall of water. Its total descent is accomplished in a series of falls aggregating nearly 500 feet. The greatest perpendicular descent is not over 200 feet. The half dozen falls between this grand descent and the bed of the river on the plateau vary from ten to twenty-five feet, adding to the majesty and grandeur of the scene. It was with great difficulty that the bottom of the falls was reached and a photograph of the scene taken.

After leaving the plateau and plunging over the falls, the waters enter an immense cañon or gorge, nearly 40 miles long and 300 yards wide, the perpendicular sides of which rise to a height of from 300 to 500 feet. The sides of this cañon show it to be hollowed out of solid Archæan rock. Through this cañon the water rushes with terrific rapidity, making passage by boat wholly impossible. Many erroneous stories have been told in regard to the height of these falls, all of them greatly exaggerating the descent of the water. The Indians of this locality of the tribe of the Nascopee or the race of Crees have long believed the falls to be haunted by an evil spirit, who punished with death any one who might dare to look upon them. The height of land or plateau which constitutes the interior of the Labrador peninsula is from 2,000 to 2,500 feet above the sea level, fairly heavily wooded with spruce, fir, hackmatack, and birch, and not at all the desolate waste it has been pictured by many writers. The barrenness of Labrador is confined to the coast, and one cannot enter the interior in any direction without being struck by the latent possibilities of the peninsula were it not for the abundance of flies and mosquitoes. Their greed is insatiable, and at times the two men were weakened from the loss of blood occasioned by these insects.

The object of the expedition being attained, the return trip was begun, and the sight of the cached boat and provisions eagerly watched for. On Aug. 15 the camp was sighted, but to their horror they saw smoke issuing from the spot. It at once flashed upon their minds what had taken place, and when they arrived they found that their fears had been all too truly realized. Charred remains of the boat, a burned octant, and a few unexploded cartridges were all that remained of the meager outfit upon which they depended to take them to the mouth of the river, a distance of over 250 miles. The camp fire, not having been completely extinguished, had burned the boat and destroyed all their provisions.

It was truly a hard outlook for them, but no time must be lost if provisions were to be obtained. Hastily a raft was constructed, the logs being bound together with spruce roots. In this way, by alternately walking and rafting, the mouth of the river was reached Aug. 29. On the way down the river five rafts had been made and abandoned. The only weapon was a small pocket revolver, and with the products of this weapon, mostly red squirrels and a few fish, they lived until they reached the different caches. Many a meal was made of one red squirrel divided between them, and upon such food they were compelled to make the best time possible. On the way up the river the shoes of one of the party had given wholly out, and he was obliged to make a rude pair of slippers from the back of a leather pack. With torn clothes and hungry bodies they presented a hard sight indeed when they joined their friends at Rigolet on the 1st of September. The party composed of Messrs. Bryant and Kenaston was passed by Cary and Cole while on the way down, but was not seen. Probably this occurred on Lake Waminikapon, the width of the lake preventing one party from seeing the other. It seemed a waste of time and energy that two expeditions in the same summer should be sent upon the same object, but neither party knew of the intention of the other until it was too late to turn back.

Grand River has long been a highway for the dependents of the Hudson Bay Company. The company formerly had a post on Lake Waminikapon, and another, called Height of Land, on the plateau. Provisions were carried to these posts, and furs brought from them by way of Grand River, the parties proceeding as far as the lake, and then, leaving Grand River some distance below the cañon, no longer being able to follow it on account of the swiftness of the water, they carried their canoes across the land to a chain of lakes connecting with the post. This station has been given up many years, and the river is used now chiefly be Indians and hunters in the winter.

It has long been known that Hamilton Inlet was of glacial origin, the immense basin hollowed out by this erosive agent being 150 miles in length. How much further this immense valley extended has never been known. Mr. Cary says that the same basin which forms Hamilton Inlet and enters Lake Melville, the two being connected by twelve miles of narrows, extends up the Grand River Valley as far as Gull Island Lake, the whole forming one grand glacial record. From Lake Melville to Gull Island the bed was being gradually filled in by the deposits of the river, but the contour of the basin is the same here as below. The bed of the country here is Archæan rock, and many beautiful specimens of labradorite dot the shores. In the distance the grim peaks of the Mealy Mountains stand out in bold relief against the sky.

The country about this interior basin is heavily wooded, and spars of 75 feet can be obtained in generous numbers. Were it not for the native inhabitants, mosquitoes, and flies, the interior would present conditions charming enough to tempt any lover of nature. It is the abundance of these invincible foes which make interior life a burden and almost an impossibility. To these inhabitants alone Grand Falls has ceased to chant its melodious tune. Hereafter its melodious ripple will be heard by Bowdoin College, which, in the name of its explorers, Cary and Cole, claims the honor of its discovery.--_New York Times_.

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ANTS.

By RUTH WARD KAHN.

Astronomy has made us all familiar with the conception of the world over our heads. We no longer speculate with Epicurus and Anaxagoras whether the sun may be as large as a quoit, or even as large as Peloponnesus. We are satisfied that the greater and the lesser lights are worlds, some of them greatly exceeding our own in magnitude.

In a little poem of Dante Rossetti's, he describes a mood of violent grief in which, sitting with his head bowed between his knees, he unconsciously eyes the wood spurge growing at his feet, till from those terrible moments he carries away the one trivial fact cut into his brain for all time, that "the wood spurge has a cup of three." In some such mood of troubled thought, flung perhaps full length on the turf, have we not as unconsciously and intently watched a little ant, trudging across our prostrate form, intent upon its glorious polity: a creature to which we, with our great spiritual world of thought and emotion and will, have no existence except as a sudden and inconvenient upheaval of parti-colored earth to be scaled, of unknown geological formation, but wholly worthless as having no bearing upon the one great end of their life--the care of larvæ.

If we hold with Mr. Wallace that the chief difference between man and the lower animals is that of kind and not of degree--that man is possessed of an intelligent will that appoints its own ends, of a conscience that imposes upon him a "categorical imperative," of spiritual faculties that apprehend and worship the invisible--yet we must admit that his lower animal nature, which forms, as it, were, the platform of the spiritual, is built up of lower organisms.

If we hold with Professor Allman that thought, will, and conscience, though only manifesting themselves through the medium of cerebral protoplasm, are not its properties any more than the invisible earth elements which lie beyond the violet are the property of the medium which, by altering their refrangibility, makes them its own--then the study of the exact nature and properties of the transmitting medium is equally necessary. Indeed, the whole position can only be finally established of defining experimentally the necessary limitation of the medium, and proving the inefficiency of the lower data to account with the higher.

It is these considerations of the wider issues that give such a peculiar interest to the patient observations which have recently been brought to bear upon the habits of the social insects, especially of ants, which, living in communities, present so many of the conditions of human life, and the development of the "tribal self" from these conditions, to which Professor Clifford attributed the genesis of moral sense.

In order to pass in review these interesting observations and bring out their significance, I must go over ground which is doubtless familiar to most of my readers.

The winged ants, which often excite surprise, are simply the virgin queens and the males. They are entirely dependent upon the workers, and are reared in the same nest. September is the month usually selected as the marriage season, and in the early twilight of a warm day the air will be dark with the winged lovers. After the wedding trip the female tears off her wings--partly by pulling, but mostly by contortions of her body--for her life under ground would render wings not only unnecessary, but cumbersome; while the male is not exposed to the danger of being eaten by his cannibal spouse, as among spiders, nor to be set upon and assassinated by infuriated spinsters, as among bees, but drags out a precarious existence for a few days, and then either dies or is devoured by insectivorous insects. There is reason to believe that some females are fertilized before leaving the nest. I have observed flights of the common _Formica rufa_, in which the females flew away solitary and to great distances before they descended. In such cases it is certain that they were fertilized before their flight.

When a fertilized queen starts a colony it proceeds much in this way: When a shaft has been sunk deep enough to insure safety, or a sheltered position secured underneath the trunk of a tree or a stone, the queen in due time deposits her first eggs, which are carefully reared and nourished. The first brood consists wholly of workers, and numbers between twenty-five and forty in some species, but is smaller in others. The mother ant seeks food for herself and her young till the initial brood are matured, when they take up the burden of life, supply the rapidly increasing family with food, as well as the mother ant, enlarge the quarters, share in the necessary duties, and, in short, become the _real_ workers of the nest before they are scarcely out of the shell. The mother ant is seldom allowed to peer beyond her dark quarters, and then only in company with her body guard. She is fed and cared for by the workers, and she in turn assists them in the rearing of the young, and has even been known to give her strength for the extension of the formicary grounds. Several queens often exist in one nest, and I have seen workers drag newly fertilized queens into a formicary to enlarge their resources. As needs be, the quantity of eggs laid is very great, for the loss of life in the ranks of the workers is very large; few survive the season of their hatching, although queens have been known to live eight years. (Lubbock.)

The ant life has four well marked periods: First, the egg; second, the grub or larva; third, the chrysalis or pupa; fourth, the imago, or perfect insect. The eggs are small, ovate, yellowish white objects, which hatch in about fifteen to thirty days. The larvæ are small legless grubs, quite large at the apex of the abdomen and tapering toward the head. Both eggs and pupa are incessantly watched and tended, licked and fed, and carried to a place of safety in time of danger. The larvæ are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and are never mixed. The larvæ period generally extends through a month, although often much longer, and in most species when the larvæ pass into pupæ they spin a cocoon of white or straw color, looking much like a shining pebble. Other larvæ do not spin a cocoon, but spend the pupal state naked. When they mature they are carefully assisted from their shells by the workers, which also assist in unfolding and smoothing out the legs. The whole life of the formicary centers upon the young, which proves they have reached a degree of civilization unknown even in some forms of higher life.

It is curious that, notwithstanding the labor of so many excellent observers, and though ants swarm in every field and wood, we should find so much difficulty in the history of these insects, and that so much obscurity should rest upon some of their habits. Forel and Ebrard, after repeated observations, maintain that in no single instance has an isolated female been known to bring her young to maturity. This is in direct contradiction to Lubbock's theory, who repeatedly tried introducing a new fertile queen into another nest of _Lasius flavus_, and always with the result that the workers became very excited and killed her, even though in one case the nest was without a queen. Of the other kinds, he isolated two pairs of _Myrmica ruginodis_, and, though the males died, the queens lived and brought their offspring to perfection; and nearly a year after their captivity, Sir John Lubbock watched the first young workers carrying the larvæ about, thereby proving the accuracy of Huber's statement, with some species at least. In spite of this convincing testimony, Lepeletier St. Fargeau is of the opinion that the nests originate with a solitary queen, as was first given.

The ants indigenous to Leadville, besides feeding on small flies, insects, and caterpillars--the carcasses of which they may be seen dragging to their nests--show the greatest avidity for sweet liquids. They are capable of absorbing large quantities, which they disgorge into the mouths of their companions. In winter time, when the ants are nearly torpid and do not require much nourishment, two or three ants told off as foragers are sufficient to provide for the whole nest. We all know how ants keep their herds in the shape of aphides, or ant cows, which supply them with the sweet liquid they exude. I have often observed an ant gently stroking the back of an aphide with its antennæ to coax it to give down its sweet fluid, much in the same way as a dairy maid would induce a cow to give down its milk by a gentle manipulation of its udders. Some species, principally the masons and miners, remove their aphides to plants in the immediate vicinity of their nest, or even introduce them into the ant home. In the interior of most nests is also found the small blind beetle (_Claviger_) glistening, and of a uniform red, its mouth of so singular a conformation that it is incapable of feeding itself. The ants carefully feed these poor dependent creatures, and in turn lick the sweet liquid which they secrete and exude. These little _Coleoptera_ are only found in the nests of some species; when introduced into the nests of others they excite great bewilderment, and, after having been carefully turned over and examined, are killed in a short time as a useless commodity. Another active species of _Coleoptera_, of the family _Staphylini_, is also found in ant nests. I have discovered one in the nest of _Formica rufa_ in the Jewish cemetery in Leadville. Furnished with wings, it does not remain in the nest, but is forced to return thither by the strange incapacity to feed itself. Like the _Claviger_, it repays its kind nurses by the sweet liquid it exudes, and which is retained by a tuft of hair on either side of the abdomen beneath the wings, which the creature lifts in order that the ant may get at its honeyed recompense. Such mutual services between creatures in no way allied is a most curious fact in the animal world.--_Popular Science News._

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A GEM-BEARING GRANITE VEIN IN WESTERN CONNECTICUT.

By L.P. GRATACAP.

In the county of Litchfield, Conn., in the midst of some of the most attractive hill country of that region, a very striking mineral fissure has been opened by Mr. S.L. Wilson, which, in both its scientific and commercial aspects, is equally important and interesting. It is a broad crevice, widened at the point of excavation into something like a pocket and filled, between its inclosing walls of gneiss, with a granitic mass whose elements have crystallized separately, so that an almost complete mineralogical separation has been effected of quartz, mica, and feldspar, while associated aggregates, as beryl and garnet, have formed under conditions that make them valuable gem fabrics.

The vein has a strike south of west and north of east and a distinct dip northwest, by which it is brought below the gneiss rock, which forms an overhanging wall, on the northerly side of the granitic mass, while on the southerly edge the same gneiss rock makes an almost vertical foot wall, and exhibits a sharp surface of demarkation and contact. The rock has been worked as an open cut through short lateral "plunges," or tunnels have been used for purposes of exploration in the upper part of its extent. Its greatest width appears to be fifty-one feet, and the present exposure of its length three hundred. It undergoes compression at its upper end, and its complete extinction upon the surface of the country at that point seems probable. At its lower end at the foot of the slope wherein the whole mass appears, it reveals considerable development, and affords further opportunities for examination, and, possibly, profitable investment. It has been formed by a powerful thrust coincident with the crumpling of the entire region, whereby deeply seated beds have become liquefied, and the magma either forced outward through a longitudinal vent or brought to the surface by a process of progressive fusion as the heated complex rose through superincumbent strata dissipated by its entrance and contributing their substance to its contents. The present exposure of the vein has been produced by denudation, as the coarsely crystalline and dismembered condition of the granite, with its large individuals of garnet and beryl, and the dense, glassy texture of the latter, indicate a process of slow cooling and complete separation, and for this result the congealing magma must necessarily have been sealed in by strata through which its heat was disseminated slowly.

For upon the most cursory inspection of the vein, the eye is arrested at once by the large masses of crystalline orthoclase, the heavy beds of a gray, brecciated quartz and the zones and columns of large leaved mica. It was to secure the latter that Mr. Wilson first exploited this locality, and only latterly have the more precious contents of the vein imparted to it a new and more significant character. The mica, called by Mr. Atwood, the superintendent of the work, "book mica," occurs in thick crystals, ranged heterogeneously together in stringers and "chimneys," and brilliantly reflecting the sunlight from their diversely commingled laminæ. This mica yields stove sheets of about two to three by four or five inches, and is of an excellent, transparent quality. It seems to be a true muscovite, and is seldom marred by magnetic markings or crystalline inclusions that would interfere with its industrial use. Seams of decomposition occur, and a yellowish scaly product, composed of hydrated mica flakes, fills them. The mica does not everywhere present this coarsely crystalline appearance, but in flexures and lines of union with the quartz and orthoclase is degraded to a mica schist upon whose surfaces appear uranates of lime and copper (autunite and torbernite), and in which are inclosed garnet crystals of considerable size and beauty. The enormous masses of clean feldspar made partially "graphic" by quartz inclosures are a conspicuous feature of the mine. In one part of the mine, wooden props support an overhanging ledge almost entirely composed of feldspar, which underneath passes into the gray brecciated quartz, which again grades into a white, more compact quartz rock. It is in this gray brecciated quartz that the beryls are found. These beautiful stones vary extremely in quality and color. Many of the large crystals are opaque, extensively fractured, and irregular in grain, but are found to inclose, especially at their centers, cores of gem-making material.