356 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



has its own beauties of grace, prettiness, or sublimity, and each is 

 largely apprehended and appreciated by means of half-unconscious 

 recollections of the others. Between the American and Canadian falls 

 at Niagara, a little belt of water forces its way through the gap which 

 severs Goat and Luna Islands, and forms a minor cataract of its own, 

 hardly heeded in the presence of the two great rivers plunging head- 

 long at its side. If one fixes one's attention for a few moments on 

 this little sheet of foam, one recognizes after a while that it is really 

 larger than any cascade in western Europe. And, if you then turn 

 your eyes to the vast semicircle of deej^-green water on your right, 

 you feel at once that without that standard of measurement your eye 

 and brain would have failed adequately to grasp the mighty dimen- 

 sions of Niagara. 



Thus, step by step, in our own individual minds, and in the history 

 of our race, the aesthetic faculty has slowly widened with every widen- 

 ing of our interests and affections. Attaching itself at first merely to 

 the human face and figure, it has gone on to embrace the works of 

 man's primitive art, and then the higher products of his decorative and 

 imitative skill. Next, seizing on the likeness between human handi- 

 craft and the works of nature, envisaged as the productions of an an- 

 thropomorphic creator, it has proceeded to the admiration for the lace- 

 work tracery of a fern or a club-moss, the sculptured surface of an 

 ammonite, the embossed and studded covering of a sea-urchin, the 

 delicate fluting of a tiny shell. Lastly, it has spread itself over a 

 wider field, with the vast expansion of human interests in the last two 

 centuries, and has learned to love all the rocks, and hills, and seas, and 

 clouds, of earth and heaven, for their own intrinsic loveliness. So it 

 has progressed in unbroken order from the simi:)le admiration of human 

 beauty, for the sake of a deeply seated organic instinct, to the admi- 

 ration of abstract beauty for its own sake alone. Mind. 



A JAPANESE TYPHOON. 



By Professor T. C. MENDENHALL. 



CONSIDERABLE information has been gathered, and much has 

 already been published, concerning the damage inflicted upon 

 this coast and in the vicinity by the typhoon which visited us during 

 the night of October 3d and 4th. 



The unpleasant frequency, in this part of the world, of stonns of 

 the same character, renders their careful investigation by competent 

 meteorologists a matter of the utmost importance. What is chiefly 

 demanded, therefore, is the collection of such meteorological records 

 and observations as may, perhaps, render it possible to trace completely 



