234 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



close with some suggestions to the Government as to what should be 

 done during the coming season. While much, no doubt, will be learned 

 from the observations taken during this winter as to the formation and 

 breaking up of the ice and generally in regard to its movements, and 

 also of the other phenomena affecting navigation, it would be mani- 

 festly impossible to state definitively from one year's observations what 

 the average period of the navigability of the strait might be. In 

 order to do this, the stations should be maintained for a second or even 

 a third year. 



The question, therefore, as to whether the navigable season of the 

 strait is sufficiently long to permit of an extensive commerce grow- 

 ing up and being profitably maintained, remains still an open one, and 

 must do so for perhaps a year or two more. Yet, in view of what has 

 been already ascertained, it certainly seems as if the probabilities were 

 all in favor of the Hudson Bay route being found practicable, and 

 pressed into the world's service at no very distant day. 



The era of sailing-vessels is rapidly passing away. The freight- 

 carriers between the continents will ere long be exclusively steamships, 

 and to steamships properly adapted for the work the passage of Hud- 

 son Strait has been clearly shown to be perfectly feasible and free from 

 danger. The matter has resolved itself down to this single point : 

 For how many months may a steamship navigate those waters ? And 

 even if the answer, deduced from the observations taken at the stations 

 now established, be that these months are too few to make the route 

 pay, Lieutenant Gordon's expedition will not have been undertaken 

 in vain, for it has thrown a flood of light upon a region hitherto com- 

 paratively unknown, and has opened Canadian eyes to the fact that 

 here, right in the heart of their own territory, they possess sources 

 of wealth, both in the seas and on the land, requiring nothing but a 

 little enterprise and capital to yield the most satisfactory returns. In 

 the bay and adjacent waters the whale, porpoise, walrus, narwhal, seal, 

 salmon, trout, and cod are ready at the summons of hook and harpoon 

 to make substantial contribution to the national wealth. Upon the 

 shore and throughout the islands minerals without number and forests 

 without limit await the lumberman and the miner. 



THE WAYS OF MONKEYS. 



By Dr. ALFRED E. BREHM. 



SHEIK KEMAL EDIN DEMIRI, who died about a. d. 1405, and 

 was the author of a voluminous treatise on the life of animals, 

 relates the following story as a fact : " The inhabitants of a town 

 called Olila, on the shore of the Red Sea, were in olden times meta- 



