242 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



'No cold winds of importance seem then to have blown with blighting 

 effect from glaciated or snow-clad districts. (Mars in our own time 

 appears to enjoy winters somewhat of this character, though a little 

 colder, with a temporary snow cap.) The seasons as we know them 

 in temperate and arctic climates, however, seem to be largely the 

 result of the glacial epoch, and its persistent legacy the arctic and 

 antarctic ice caps. If we could once manage to get rid of those, it is 

 possible that our planet might again enjoy in all its zones the mild 

 and genial preglacial winters. 



These are rough notes, 1 know; mere adumbrations of a probable 

 truth: but adequately to develop the subject would require a very 

 big volume. My object here is simply to suggest that in many in- 

 quiries, both into human and animal or vegetable life, we must never 

 take the existence of seasons as we know them for granted, except in 

 very recent times. The year, for organic beings, means essentially 

 the seasons; and the seasons may mean and have meant many sepa- 

 rate things, as time and place vary — heat and cold, food and scarcity, 

 foliage and leaflessness, drought and wet; longer or shorter days, the 

 midnight sun and the winter darkness; hibernation and wakefulness; 

 the egg, the cocoon, the seed, the plant, the flower, the fruit; dor- 

 mancy or vitality. According as human life started at the poles or 

 the equator, for instance, it would view in the beginning many things 

 differently. All I wish to point out now is merely this, that we must 

 bear such possibilities ever in mind; and that we must never take it 

 for granted in any problem, human or biological, that the seasons 

 were always just what we know them, or that the year to any organic 

 being meant anything more than the seasonal cycle then and there 

 prevalent. — Longman's Magazine. 



In the excavations of the ancient cemetery of Antinoe, near Lyons, 

 France, a " party dress " of the time of the Emperor Adrian, very fine silks, 

 jewels, etc., have been discovered. One sarcophagus held the remains of a 

 woman musician with a rose chemise, a cythara, pearls, castanets, etc. ; in 

 another was a child's costume with its little laced shoes, its vest ornamented 

 with flowers appliques, and its robe of gauffered crape. It appears that the 

 women of sixteen hundred years ago dyed their hair with henna, and 

 twisted ribbons round their heads. Nothing changes. 



M. A. Thieullen, publishing the results of fifteen years' studies among 

 the flint implements of the French beds, draws the conclusions that the 

 elaborate palaeolithic flint axe and hammer and the typical neolithic imple- 

 ments were luxuries used by the more distinguished members or for the 

 more important purposes of the flint-implement-using community, while 

 the ruder implements which are found in enormous numbers were the 

 objects of general and daily use throughout all the flint-using ages, whether 

 palaeolithic or neolithic. 



