140 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



fenses; the material, architecture, furnish- 

 ing, and adornment of their dwellings, wheth- 

 er they be huts, pile-dwellings, caves, or 

 tents ; their public buildings, temples, sacred 

 places, and altars ; their domestic, hunting, 

 and farming utensils, pottery, glassware, 

 metallic and wooden vessels ; how they 

 make and apply their paints ; their mining 

 arts ; their usages in trade ; their money 

 and their manner of counting ; how they 

 make their fires ; their intoxicants and nar- 

 cotics ; what they know and have of music 

 and musical instruments ; what with them 

 takes the place of writing; their supersti- 

 tions and folk-lore, and particularly the ob- 

 jects to which they give special honors ; 

 their social customs and usages in inter- 

 course with friends and enemies ; observ- 

 ances in the matters of birth, marriage, and 

 death ; their diseases and methods of cure ; 

 their ideas as to a future state ; their tradi- 

 tions as to their origin ; their knowledge of 

 the stars, and their manner of computing 

 time. The questions covering these points 

 in detail are to be sent out, in English and 

 German, to ship-captains, merchants, con- 

 suls, and missionaries, who, it is expected, 

 will enter upon the schedule notes embody- 

 ing such information as they can furnish. 

 As it is impossible to make the questions 

 exhaustive, further communications than 

 those asked for, such as the judgment of the 

 respondent may dictate, will be thankfully 

 received. 



An Artificial Volcano. The newspapers 

 of Cologne tell of a kind of artificial volcano 

 which was produced recently at Apenrade, 

 in the Rhine provinces, in the course of the 

 digging of an artesian well. At the depth 

 of not quite five hundred feet, a strong ebul- 

 lition was noticed, accompanied by a dull 

 rumbling. Then, all at once, the earth and 

 stones in the tube were violently blown out 

 to a considerable height, with a heavy deto- 

 nation, and a column of gas came up hiss- 

 ing. When lighted with a match, the gas 

 burned with a clear flame, rising high in the 

 air, till it was extinguished by a new erup- 

 tion of pebbles and dirt. Eruptions of 

 stones and gas continued till the time the 

 story was told, when the flame of the gas 

 continued to be of undiminished intensity. 

 The phenomenon was occasioned, of course, 



1 by one of those accumulations of gas which 

 I take place now and then in the bowels of 

 the earth, giving rise to fire-damp explosions 

 in coal-mines, causing earthquake-shocks in 

 countries which are not volcanic, and giving 

 rise to the so-called " mud-volcanoes," when 

 the gas forces its passage through .beds of 

 moist clay. 



Origin of Native Gold. Professor J. S. 

 Xewberry has presented some strong points 

 of fact and argument against the theory 

 that the grains and nuggets of gold found 

 in placers are formed by precipitation from 

 chemical solutions. He holds, in a paper 

 he has published on the subject, that geol- 

 ogy teaches, in regard to the genesis and 

 distribution of gold, that it exists in the 

 oldest known rocks, and has been thence 

 distributed through all strata derived from 

 them ; that, in the metamorphosis of these 

 derived rocks, it has been concentrated into 

 segregated quartz-veins by some process not 

 yet understood ; that it is a constituent of 

 fissure-veins of all geological .ages, where it 

 has been deposited from hot chemical solu- 

 tions, which have reached deeply buried 

 rocks of various kinds, gathering from them 

 gold with other metallic minerals ; and that 

 gold has been accumulated through mechan- 

 ical agents in placer deposits by the erosion 

 of strata containing auriferous veins. 



What has been gained by Vivisection. 



Dr. Ferrier was recently arrested in Eng- 

 land for practicing vivisection without a 

 license, and the members of the British Med- 

 ical Association were indignant at the act, 

 regarding it as an insult and a measure of 

 annoyance. Dr. Ferrier's offense seems to 

 have been observing with Dr. Yeo, who had 

 a license, experiments that were intended to 

 throw light upon certain features of the 

 treatment of lesions of the brain. Dr. Fer- 

 rier's investigations in this department, 

 which would have been impossible without 

 vivisection, have been of immediate and of 

 the greatest value to mankind. Among the 

 results of them has been the discovery of 

 the means of localizing in its definite region 

 the point where an injury, resulting in epi- 

 leptic fits, has been inflicted, and of apply- 

 ing remedial treatment to the precise spot 

 where it will be effective. Dr. Echeverria 



