524 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



which has taught us that squalls and thundershowers constitute 

 depressions in miniature, or at least weak secondary depressions 

 dependent upon a principal depression and formed under its im- 

 mediate influence. 



The old miller, an observer by virtue of his profession and 

 then an observer by the force of circumstances, was obliged to 

 study the wind in all its manifestations of direction and force ; 

 he was thus aware that its maximum velocity corresponded with 

 the maximum temperature of the day. Although this rule is not 

 without exceptions, the miller was rarely mistaken. Proof of 

 this is given in the habitual and reassuring response to the 

 farmers who came to the mill in the afternoon, when the wind 

 had fallen so low that no grinding could be done : 



" Come to-morrow noon again, 

 And then I will grind your grain." 



Everyday observation has taught us that things really go 

 thus when the wind originates under anticyclonic conditions ; in 

 the opposite case, if the wind rises in the evening and gains force 

 during the night, the meteorologist concludes that its origin is 

 cyclonic, and a change of weather is probable. Translated for The 

 Popular Science Monilily from del et Terre. 



In a p Der on the Inheritance of Acquired Characters, Prof. A. S. Packard 

 assumes th t '' all progress in humanity appears to be due, not only to our main- 

 taining the present intellectual environment, with the manifold and many-sided 

 stimuli of our present social structure, but also to the unceasing efforts of the 

 leaders in advanced thought in many different departments of training and effort 

 to open up new fields of research in natural, physical, and mental science and 

 their applications, to gain new and higher points of view in sociology and morals 

 as well as in statecraft, and, in short, to perfect and hasten the development of 

 the ideal man. Unless this progress, which is a historical fact, has been due, not 

 only at the outset, but all through human history thus far, to this principle of 

 the inheritance of mental traits, causing the intellectual efforts of one generation 

 to pass down and thus to have finally a cumulative effect, how could there be 

 any progress in human society ? On the one hand, let us imagine a cessation of 

 the operation of this principle. Suppose all the forces and stimuli of modern 

 society to bo removed, and tlie human organism to live like blind beetles in a 

 cave, or a savage tribe isolated in the midst of an otherwise uninhabited conti- 

 nent, with a total uniformity of conditions, i)hysical, social, and moral, the effects 

 of disuse would .at once set in. Heredity without this vivifying principle of 

 cumulative transmission, as it might be called, would be retrogressive in its 

 action, and the race would by reversion return to the status of prehistoric times. 

 Or, on the other hand, if the present intellectual environment were maintained 

 without the cumulative action of the principle of inheritance of acquired charac- 

 ters, the social organism would become stagnant, and the race would be semi- 

 fossilized, or in a state of arrested development, like the Chinese." 



