376 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



species are found regularly during the breeding season in the 

 valleys of the Susquehanna, Delaware, Hudson, and even the 

 Connecticut Rivers, extending inland for a greater or less distance, 

 but are unknown in the surrounding higher country. Thus, 

 Carolina wrens, cardinals, turkey buzzards, and other no less 

 characteristic Carolinian birds are abundant in the bottom lands 

 along the Susquehanna in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, but 

 are scarcely ever found on the uplands above the wooded slopes 

 of the river, though the conditions of food and shelter seem 

 equally favorable.* 



Much of the outside world enters a man's soul and becomes 

 the ground of his joy through life. We all owe something to the 

 region in which we dwell, unconsciously perhaps, but still some- 

 thing that is assimilated by the tissues of the inner life, and that 

 goes to the making of what we really are. Those of us who dwell 

 on the borderland of Dixie owe some fragmentary moments of 

 inspiration, even of happiness, to the genial influence of its prox- 

 imity. We think of ourselves as belonging with the North, but 

 has not the South spun a few threads into the web of our lives ? 

 The cardinal whistles the same sweet tune as he does in " Old 

 Virginia " ; the opossum and the persimmon savor of the South ; 

 even the turkey buzzard suggests the warmer clime. And then 

 spring is always two weeks earlier just down the Delaware, and 

 this is something ; even if it is too far off to start the " spring 

 feeling," it hints of fresh early strawberries and the first run of 

 the shad. 



Prof. J. J. Thomson, addressing the Section of Mathematics and Phys- 

 ical Science in the British Association, was able to testify to a great improve- 

 ment which had taken place in the teaching of science in the public and 

 secondary schools during the past ten years. The standard in physics 

 attained by the pupils was increasing from year to year. There might, 

 however, be danger of a temptation to make the pupils cover too much 

 ground. "Although you may increase the rate at which information is 

 acquired, you can not increase in anything like the same proportion the 

 rate at which the subject is assimilated, so as to become a means of strength- 

 ening the mind and a permanent mental endowment when the facts have 

 been long forgotten," In the university training of intending physicists 

 the preservation of youthful enthusiasm was, in the speaker's opinion, one 

 of the most important points for consideration; and this could best be 

 effected "by allowing the student, even before he is supposed to be ac- 

 quainted with the whole of physics, to begin some original research of a 

 simple kind under the guidance of a teacher who will encourage him and 

 assist in the removal of difficulties. If the student once tastes the delights 

 of the successful completion of the investigation he is not likely to go back." 



* Witmer Stone. The Birds of Eastern Pennsylvania and New Jersey, p. 10. 



