642 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ceremonials are founded seem to be reversed. Professional merry- 

 men are proverbially grave and melancholy in private life, while 

 undertakers, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, are cheery 

 beyond their fellows. The assumption, therefore, of devotional 

 attitudes, and of a pious countenance, in the hope that the soul 

 may follow suit, may not be so safe as has been generally sup- 

 posed. 



Even if space permitted, it would be impossible on the pres- 

 ent occasion to analyze each of the many distinct trade expres- 

 sions which must be familiar to all dwellers in towns. In the 

 first place, our knowledge of the inner lives of most persons out- 

 side our own class or social circle is quite insufficient to justify 

 us in theorizing concerning the forces which may have been 

 instrumental in making them, facially, what they are. Until 

 some enthusiastic naturalist will apply the methods of Lubbock 

 and Huber to his fellow-men, we must be content to remain in 

 comparative ignorance. But if the general principles which I 

 have ventured to put forward in this paper are to be trusted, any 

 new fact concerning the habits of any section of the great human 

 swarm may at once be made available by those who are endeav- 

 oring to place physiognomy on a sound basis. Blackwood's 

 Magazine. 



NATURAL RAIN-MAKERS. 



By ALEXANDER McADIE. 



THE efficiency of the clouds in lifting water will be brought 

 home to us if we consider the rainfall over a garden fifty feet 

 wide and one hundred feet in length. If one hundredth of an inch 

 of rain occurs, about twenty-five gallons or two hundred and fifty 

 pounds of water will have fallen. One inch of rain over the gar- 

 den would mean twenty-five thousand pounds of water. 



A rainfall of forty-five inches in a year is not an unusually 

 large rainfall. New York city has a mean annual rainfall of 45'2 

 inches, the observations covering a period of twenty- two years. 

 If this rain of a year fell in equal amounts each day, we would 

 have for every acre of surface two thousand eight hundred gal- 

 lons of water, or in avoirdupois nearly nine thousand tons of water 

 to the square mile. Tipping Manhattan Island each evening and 

 draining it would give two hundred thousand tons of water. In 

 a year over seventy million tons of water are dropped on the roofs, 

 sheds, and pavements of Manhattan Island. 



It requires a powerful pump to lift water in such quantities 

 and store it in reservoirs thousands of feet above us. And these 

 reservoirs are remarkable ; for they have no walls of rigid ma- 



