POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



277 



derness without inhabitant, without mails, 

 without roads, and with only an occasional 

 party of Indians or explorers, following the 

 ancient and overgrown trails of two centu- 

 ries ago." Fires have denuded the region 

 of its primitive forests ; but the older burn- 

 ings are becoming overgrown with thickets 

 of aspen, white paper birch, cherry, etc. A 

 few remnants of the original forest are oc- 

 casionally found ; and various shrubs and 

 low herbs occur. Many small tracts of deep 

 and productive soil intervene between the 

 almost universal rocky or thinly covered 

 exposures. The summer climate was agree- 

 able, with sunny days as the rule during two 

 seasons. No experience was had of the 

 winter climate. The character of the coun- 

 try covered by Mr. H. V. Winchell's Rainy 

 Lake survey varies greatly in different re- 

 gions. In the vicinity of Rainy and the 

 neighboring lakes, it is very rocky, while 

 west of these lakes the surface consists of 

 drift deposits, and the underlying rock ap- 

 pears only at rapids and waterfalls in the 

 streams and a few places in the midst of the 

 forest. The region within the limits of the 

 glacial lake Agassiz is now covered with a 

 fine growth of timber, both hard and soft 

 wood, and is excellent farming land. 



Old Cyclopaedias. The most extensive, 

 and one of the oldest of cyclopaedias is the Chi- 

 nese work, the name of which may be trans- 

 lated as the " Thesaurus of Writings Ancient 

 and Modern," compiled under the scholarly 

 Emperor Kang Hi, which was printed toward 

 the close of the last century. It was the 

 fruit of forty years of labor, and filled 5,020 

 volumes ; but this by no means implies that 

 it was as large as a European book of that 

 number of volumes would be. Pliny's " Nat- 

 ural History " may be regarded as the oldest 

 European encyclopaedia. The '' Speculum 

 Majus " of Vincent de Beauvais, in the thir- 

 teenth century, was divided into 10,000 chap- 

 ters, several of which were subdivided alpha- 

 betically. About a hundred years later came 

 the " De Proprietatibus Rerum " of the Eng- 

 lish Franciscan Bartholomew de Glanville, 

 which was translated into the English of 

 the day. Johann Alsted's " Encyclopaedia " 

 (1630) was one of the first works that bore the 

 name. The anonymous " Universal Histori- 

 cal Geographical, Chronological, and Classi- 



cal Dictionary" (1703), a nearly forgotten 

 work, is said to be "full, concise, lively, and, 

 all things considered, wonderfully accurate," 

 but some very funny statements made in it 

 are pointed out. In the next year was pub- 

 lished Dr. Harris's " Lexicon Technicum, or 

 an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sci- 

 ences," which has been given the credit, that 

 of right belongs to the preceding work, of be- 

 ing the first alphabetical encyclopaedia writ- 

 ten in English. Next to these works fol- 

 low the generation of cyclopaedias which are 

 still known among us, beginning with Eph- 

 raim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) and 

 D'Alembert and Diderot's great work, and 

 coming down to the new edition of the 

 " Britannica," Stephen's " Dictionary of Na- 

 tional Biography," and Appletons' " Ameri- 

 can Cyclopaedia" and their "Cyclopaedia of 

 American Biography." 



The Ice-Cap of Greenland. Dr. Frithiof 

 Nansen showed, in the British Association, 

 in opposition to Nordenskiold's opinioD, that 

 the part of Greenland which his expedi- 

 tion had traversed is covered with a shell- 

 shaped mantle of ice and snow, under which 

 mountains, as well as valleys, have quite dis- 

 appeared, and where the configuration of 

 the land and mountains can not be traced. 

 The ice covering rises rather regularly but 

 rapidly from the east coast to a height of 

 nine or ten thousand feet, is rather flat and 

 even in the middle, and falls off again regu- 

 larly toward the west coast. There must be 

 mountains and valleys in the interior of 

 Greenland as well as on the coast. It is al- 

 ready known that there are on the coasts 

 deep fiords and lofty mountains very like 

 those of western Norway, and that they 

 have in some places just the same wild and 

 prominent character. If we entertain the 

 opinion that these fiords were excavated by 

 the ice, we must also conclude that the same 

 ice has been able to excavate valleys and 

 form mountains in the interior of the conti- 

 nent. We have no right, therefore, to seek 

 the reason of the shield-like shape of the ice 

 in the configuration of the land underneath 

 its surface. It must have a shape of its 

 own, which was given, not by the land, but 

 by the meteorological circumstances. No- 

 body could deny that the ice might in some 

 places have an enormous thickness, as it 



