FRAGMENTS OF SCIFNCE. 



715 



accepted as final by all subsequent conven- 

 tions. In 1881-'82, 81 per cent of the 280 

 schools for the deaf on the Continent of Eu- 

 rope were pure oral schools, 4 per cent were 

 sign schools, and 15 per cent pursued a 

 combined system. Prof. Bell traces the ori- 

 gin of his invention of the telephone to his 

 observation of the ability of the pupils in the 

 Horace Mann School to understand what was 

 said to them by reading the movements of 

 the lips. He was finally convinced of the 

 fact, and was led to study the subject ; then 

 to devise machines and contrivances to help 

 the children, the ultimate outcome of which 

 was the telephone. 



" Geological Myths." As " geological 

 myths," Prof. B. K. Emerson, in his chair- 

 man's address before the Geological Section 

 of the American Association, characterized 

 " the Chimjera, or the poetry of Petroleum ; 

 the Niobe, or the tragic side of calcareous 

 tufa ; Lot's wife, or the indirect religious 

 effects of cliff erosion ; and Noah's flood, or 

 the possibilities of the cyclone and the 

 earthquake wave working in harmony." Re- 

 garding a myth as meaning " a history, 

 treasured and hallowed in the literary and 

 religious archives of an ancient folk, of 

 some startling or impressive event that, in 

 the stimulating environment of poetry and 

 personification, has completed a long evolu- 

 tion which disguises entirely its original," 

 the author sought the origin of these stories 

 in traits of the natural features with which 

 they were associated. The Chimera was de- 

 scribed by the Greek poets as a monster 

 having the tail of a dragon, the body of a 

 goat, and the head of a lion, or the three 

 heads of lion, goat, and serpent, vomiting 

 fire and ravaging the mountains of Lycia. 

 By comparing the references in various 

 authors with the observations of Admiral 

 Beaufort at the end of the last century, 

 the examination of the spot by Spratt and 

 Forbes in 1842, and the accounts of other 

 modern travelers, the origin of the fable is 

 traced to a mountain called the Yanardagh, 

 formerly Chimera (both names meaning 

 burning mountain), from a crevice of which 

 issues a stream of burning gas. The Greek 

 word xoM^^P" means goat. Hence the origin 

 of the basis of the myth, the goat's body, to 

 which, it really vomiting flames, imagination 



added the heads and the tail. Niobe, who 

 wept herself into a stone over the death of 

 her twelve children slain and petrified, is, 

 as the American scholar Van Lennep has 

 shown, a prehistoric statue of a woman, cut 

 in the rock of Mount Sipylus, in Lydia, over 

 which the water trickles from the rocks 

 above. Below the figure lie in the talus 

 rocks fallen from the cliffs, out of which 

 imagination may construct the children 

 turned to stone. The name Niobe is asso- 

 ciated in sound with Greek words signifying 

 the pouring of water and the falling of snow. 

 Lot's wife is representative of a common 

 phenomenon of the salt ridge of Kushum 

 Usdum, or Sodom, on the Dead Sea, where 

 one pillar is formed out of the mass as its 

 predecessor is eaten away. The story of the 

 Flood may well stand as a graphic descrip- 

 tion of the combined action of a cyclone and 

 an earthquake with tidal wave, affecting the 

 region of the Persian Gulf. 



The Circulation in Plants. The discus- 

 sion in the Botanical Section of the British 

 Association on the circulation of water in 

 plants was participated in by Francis Dar- 

 win, Prof. Marshall Ward, Prof. Fitzgerald, 

 and Dr. Joly, of Dublin. Mr. Darwin con- 

 sidered the path of the ascending current in 

 trees and the force that produces the ascent 

 of the water. Attention was called to the 

 necessity of a complete study of the minute 

 structure of wood in relation to the modern 

 theories. Prof. Vines referred to an ac- 

 count he had published of a number of 

 experiments on the suction force of branches. 

 He had been under the impression that the 

 results obtained were independent of the 

 action of atmospheric pressure that they 

 were solely indications of tensile stress ex- 

 erted by the transpiring branch upon the 

 water in the apparatus ; but now he had 

 reason to believe that they were, as a mat- 

 ter of fact, affected by the atmospheric 

 pressure. Hence these results are not differ- 

 ent in kind from those of other observers, 

 but are compatible with them. The obser- 

 vations brought out the two important facts 

 that a high suction force can be developed 

 by branches which have been deprived of 

 their leaves, and that this suction force is 

 not dependent on the life of the branch. 

 Prof. Vines then proceeded to give an ac- 



