306 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Ainos had been absorbed into the Japanese race, and its physical fea- 

 tures were therefore, on historical evidence, more strongly continental. 

 The face, in the second place, is that of a drowned man : it is horridly 

 infiltrated, the nose swollen and the mouth widely opened. In such 

 a case the complicated nature of the meaningless resemblance can 

 hardly be overestimated. For we have in it, as will be seen, a series 

 of resemblances which are added one to the other, from the general to 

 the specific, in somewhat the following way: human face (in itself, of 

 course, a very complicated structure) : male: young: oriental: primitive 

 Japanese : drowned. 



A second meaningless resemblance is shown, Fig. 2, in a whale's 

 " earbone " which was found on a beach in Norway: it portrays in half 

 relief a Scandinavian face of low caste, and with almost absurd accu- 

 racy — with rounded cheek-bones, flattened nose-bridge, small upper lip 

 and receding jaw. 



In both of these cases there is an extraordinary meaningless corre- 

 spondence between the resembling objects and the especial locality in 

 which they occur. And this condition occurs with amusing frequency. 



A case in point occurs in the skull of a goat, Fig. 3, picked up in 

 Agra, which shows on its supra-occiput the face of the common monkey 

 of the locality, the Hanuman {Presbytes entellus), for it shows (with 

 a slight tax on the imagination) the front view of this monkey's for- 

 wardly directed beard, cheek-tufts and brow-hair, and these, too, in 

 light tone against the dark-colored face. 



Another possible case is that of the squash seeds, Fig. 4, which in 

 drying acquire irregular depressions on their surface, and thus produce 



Fig .4. Squash Seeds picturing Ideographs. 



the effect of idiographs. They are said to have come originally from 

 Japan, but in any event so perfect are the " characters " that I have 

 known a Japanese scholar to puzzle over them for several minutes in 

 his effort to read them ! 



A somewhat analogous instance, Japanese (noted by my friend, 

 Dr. Yatsu), is that of the " Tokngawa fish," a small species of Salanx, 

 which is said to have appeared in Yedo (Tokyo) shortly after the last 

 dynasty of regents made their seat there. This fish is curious in that 

 its head bears the badge of the Tokngawa family, the three Asarum 



