538 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



given, that the comparatively equal head growth of all known 

 men is no evidence whatever against the theory of their evolu- 

 tionary descent, while the closely related fact that man shares 

 with certain lower species of animals built like himself a brain 

 development peculiar to him and them, and which has succeeded 

 to an arrested head growth in his and their case alike, is more than 

 an indication, it is very good proof so far as it goes that he and 

 they had a similar if not the same origin and are members of the 

 same family. And it is also evident, in the case of man at least, 

 that this convolutional brain development is continuous from the 

 lowest savages up to the age of machinery and the extreme divi- 

 sion of labor, the accompanying institution of voluntary benev- 

 olent associations, and the modern forms of parental government, 

 when it thus meets for the first time with a threatened reversal 

 in the case of the routine laborer. He finds himself as a result 

 of these changes in this predicament, he is still in possession, by 

 inheritance, of the full brain development of the civilized, but 

 with less use for, or need of it than has the hunting savage of 

 the neolithic period. 



In taking leave of this subject, one question not quite pertinent 

 to the issue can not be repressed. Since all civilizations thus far 

 have encountered a brood of incidental evils peculiarly their own, 

 and, if not of their own creation, still consequent upon them, who 

 can say that the one just exposed may not be the primal cause of 

 the world-wide unrest of the present laboring classes, finding ex- 

 pression in all sorts of disorder from strikes to anarchy the first 

 fruits of atrophy the vain attempt to employ an otherwise idle 

 and already degenerating organ of thought, and, like all readjust- 

 ments to a lower plane, resulting in vicious and reactionary con- 

 duct ? If this result had been foreseen, could the cause have been 

 suppressed ? Is social growth, to any greater extent than indi- 

 vidual, modified by desire and volition ? 



On the temperature of the surface of the huge extents of water of the oceans, 

 Captain W. J. L. Wharton observes, the cUniates of the different parts of the 

 world largely depend. Areas where great diflferences of surface temperature pre- 

 vail are those in which storms are generated. In the region south of Nova 

 Scotia and Newfoundland many of the storms which travel over the Atlantic 

 have their rise. Hero the variations are excessive, not only from the juxtaposi- 

 tion of the warm water of the Gulf Stream and the cold water of the arctic cur- 

 rent flowing southward inside of it, but in the Gulf Stream itself, which is com- 

 posed of streaks of warm and colder water, between which differences of as much 

 as 20 Fahr. exist. The same conditions exist south of the Cape of Good Hope, 

 another well-known birthplace of storms. Here the Agulhas current of about 

 70 Fahr., diverted by the land, pours into the mass of water to the northward, 

 colder by some 25, and the meeting place is known as being most tempestuous. 



