862 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



the Spaniards entered the country ; while in 

 Yucatan, whore the Spaniards first came in 

 contact with Indians who used stone as a 

 building material, some of the ruined struct- 

 ures now to be seen were inhabited by the 

 natives at the time of the conquest. The 

 author believes that the civilized portion of 

 the Maya race have at some time occupied 

 all the country lying between the Isthmus of 

 Tehuantepec and the western frontiers of 

 Honduras and Salvador, excepting perhaps a 

 strip of country along the Pacific seaboard ; 

 that this people spoke the same or nearly 

 allied languages, which they wrote or carved 

 in the same script ; that they were followers 

 of the same religion ; and that they built 

 stone-roofed temples and houses decorated 

 with the same class of design and ornament. 

 At the time of the Spanish conquest they 

 had abandoned their towns and religious 

 centers south of Yucatan, though from the 

 present condition of the mines it could not 

 have been many years before ; while in Yu- 

 catan, where they probably still occupied 

 some of the buildings, they were in a state 

 of decadence, and many of the larger centers 

 of population had been abandoned, although 

 the more important religious edifices may 

 still have been reverenced and kept in re- 

 pair. The early Spanish writers speak of 

 large numbers of books written and pre- 

 served by the natives of Yucatan. They 

 were written in the Maya language, and in 

 characters called hieroglyphical. The Span- 

 iards destroyed all of these books they could, 

 thinking them the work of the devil, but 

 copies of three of them escaped, and are 

 preserved in European museums. The char- 

 acters in which they are written are similar 

 to those of the inscriptions on the monu- 

 ments ; and both are believed to be in a 

 language that is still living and spoken in 

 the region, although it has probably been 

 much changed in the course of years. 



The Sargasso Sea. A theory of the 

 Sargasso Sea is proposed by M. Krummel, 

 different from that of Humboldt, which was 

 based, he avers, on less complete obser- 

 vations than we have now. This sea is 

 in the form of an ellipse with the major 

 axis nearly following the tropic of cancer. 

 Around the principal ellipse are other larger 

 ones, in which the vegetation is not so thick, 



and the forms of which are affected by pre- 

 vailing winds. M. Krummel believes that 

 the sea-weeds come from the shore regions 

 of the Gulf of Mexico, the Antilles, Florida, 

 and the Bahamas, and not from the bottom 

 of the sea, as was formerly supposed, and is 

 in this supported by recent observations 

 of the Gulf Stream. This current is now 

 believed to be the resultant of numerous 

 currents coming from the Antilles, and there- 

 fore to carry a much larger quantity of sea- 

 weed than was formerly supposed. These 

 sea-weeds reach the Sargasso region in about 

 fifteen days after they enter the Gulf Stream. 

 They are carried slowly onward toward the 

 Azores till they become water-logged and 

 sink, to give place to others. 



Secular and Periodic Changes in Lati- 

 tude. A committee appointed by the Ameri- 

 can Association to secure data with regard 

 to secular and periodical changes in latitude, 

 reported that the investigation could best be 

 made in a method suggested by Prof. S. 

 Newcomb, of observations at three stations 

 somewhere near the same parallel of lati- 

 tude, but in widely different longitudes ; the 

 observations to be extended over a sufficient 

 interval of time to secure the elimination of 

 any effect arising from the recently discov- 

 ered short-period variations in the latitude. 

 Such a series of observations, followed after 

 an interval of from ten to twenty years by 

 another similar series, would furnish suit- 

 able evidence on the subject. It seems ad- 

 visable also to utilize as far as possible 

 some of the older determinations of latitude 

 at American stations, particularly the Bond- 

 Peirce determination at Cambridge in 1845 

 and the earlier Coast Survey determinations. 

 New observations are already promised at 

 Cambridge and Washington. The more de- 

 tailed recommendations of the committee, in 

 harmony with these views, were approved by 

 the Association. 



Remedies for Defective Color-vision. 



A committee of the Royal Society appointed 

 to consider the question of testing for de- 

 fective color-vision has made a report rec- 

 ommending that a schedule be made of 

 employments in the mercantile marine and 

 on railways, the filling of which by persons 

 whose vision is defective, or who are igno- 



