4?4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



mouse, and the cow. One of the months returns twice, and that is the 

 thirteenth of the year. Each month has thirty days, and the week 

 has seven. 



The priests are greatly respected on account of their spiritual funo 

 tions, and they exercise a great influence upon the whole population. 

 It is these who are specially addressed to fix the day propitious to 

 celebrate marriage, or to point out the kind of funeral proper for a 

 person dead. In this last circumstance they conform to the rank, more 

 or less important, of the deceased, or, to speak more correctly, to the 

 greater or smaller number of sheep which the relations offer for the 

 hhouroul. The more liberal the offering, the more distinguished is 

 the sepulture. But, since the rich have more means for making offer- 

 ings, their bodies are ordinarily destined to be burned, while the corpse 

 of a poor man is simply interred, or even abandoned in the midst of 

 the steppe, to become the prey of wild animals. 



The principal evil arising from this great influence of the priests 

 over the Calmuck population is, that it is opposed to every civilizing 

 effort ; this is why all the attempts of the government to convert the 

 Calmucks to Christianity, and to induce them to abandon their no- 

 mad life, have hitherto almost entirely failed. Moreover, the nature 

 of the country occupied by the Calmucks is greatly opposed to their 

 being able to establish themselves in colonies. Anthropological Re' 

 view. 







THE BALANCE OF LIFE IN THE AQTTAKIUM. 



By SHIELEY HIBBAED. 



WHEN man looks upon Nature, he sees everywhere the records 

 of death's work among the representatives of creative energy. 

 The stratified rocks are but the tombstones in the great graveyard of 

 the world ; they cover the bones of a million generations, and their in- 

 scription is, " The dust we tread upon was once alive." If the infusion 

 of life into countless forms, each in itself perfect, needed nothing less 

 than Almighty power, it needed Almighty power too to complete the 

 scheme in the institution of dissolution ; and the grim king of terrors, 

 before whom the bee and the sparrow tremble, perhaps, not less than 

 man, became co-worker with God by a wise and beneficent appoint- 

 ment ; and so the orders of being began, and have to this hour con- 

 tinued, as a series of dissolving views, in which there is no hiatus, but 

 only change ; no shifting of the focus or the screen, no aberration or 

 intermission of the source of light, but an unending variety in the 

 pictures. We know not how other worlds may fare, but this we know, 

 that here death supplies from every extinguished picture the colors 



