544 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



8. It is sufficiently obvious that we have yet much to learn in regard 

 to the constitution of the Leonid ring, and that future observations 

 from the 13th to the 15th of November may i^robably result in im- 

 portant discoveries. 



Bloomington, Indiana, November 25, 1880. 







PEEHISTOEIC SCIENCE EN FJ&TE. 



TO the uninitiated an " International Congress of Prehistoric An- 

 thropology and Archaeology" may seem a formidable affair, 

 where no more cheerful entertainment than a feast of dry bones could 

 be allowed, and where a member indulging in a joke would be instant- 

 ly called to order. Those who attended the late meeting of this Con- 

 gress at Lisbon know better. They know that under cover of their 

 imposing title this scientific Congress can give itself up to sociability, 

 and even levity, without imperiling its dignity. They know that this 

 assembly of men, representing the scientific world in nearly every 

 country in Europe, has as human an idea of enjoyment as the most 

 ordinary mortals who have never even heard of the Neanderthal skull, 

 and to whom the term palaeolithic or quatei*nary man calls up no vision 

 of cave-bears ,or hairy mammoths, living hob-and-nob, so to speak, with 

 our flint-using ancestors. 



Let us follow the fortunes of the Congress, the idea that the typi- 

 cal Dryasdust flourishes among its members being dispelled. The first 

 unofticial seance may be said to have taken place at Almorchon, a junc- 

 tion half-way from Madrid, where all the scientific pilgrims, more or 

 less tired and dusty, made a rush at the buffet to get what food was to 

 be had. Those who had been traveling from Madrid since the previ- 

 ous evening and those who had taken a preliminary tour through An- 

 dalusia here met, and Instantly there was a Babel of tongues German, 

 Italian, French, and English. Only Spanish was not to be heard, so 

 that, but for the tropical heat of the sun and the Sahara-like aspect of 

 the surrounding country, one would hardly have realized that one was 

 in the Peninsula. Friends were inquiring how each other's work had 

 sped since the meeting four years ago at Buda-Pesth, or that of Stock- 

 holm two years earlier. Scientific men who had never met before, and 

 who only knew each other by books or letters, were being " enchanted 

 to make each other's acquaintance '' in the best French they could 

 muster. Some were deploring in hushed tones the great loss just sus- 

 tained by anthropology in the death of M. Paul Broca, who was to 

 have been present at Lisbon. Here was the universal favorite, M. de 

 Quatrefages, of the French Institute, in a gray suit and wideawake, 

 looking more like a genial English geologist than a French savant, 



