78o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



plish gray. Some of its habits are very extraordinary, while no 

 doubt it has many others as yet unknown. Captivity is but illy 

 borne by it, and it soon perishes in that state, and indeed it is 

 said the species is on the highroad to extinction in its native 

 land. No doubt this will be effected even before we are fully ac- 

 quainted with all its habits and ways, and man will be respon- 

 sible for sweeping off the face of the earth forever one of the love- 

 liest forms that has ever graced it or ever will. Dismal indeed 

 will be the forests and Nature's wilds when each and all such 

 graceful creatures, such forms of life and beauty, are completely 

 exterminated. Such work is going on in every quarter of the 

 globe as I pen these lines, and with very marked rapidity. Still, 

 this is but fate and the natural order of things; and we must be- 

 lieve that in the centuries to come the Earth will see the day when 

 man's descendants will be her only inhabitants, with perhaps the 

 merest remnant of any other forms of vertebrate life, and these 

 completely subjected to his will and sway. How much the more,- 

 then, does it devolve upon us to fully record in all particulars 

 the biology of those forms now in existence in our midst, and 

 especially those types, the outliers the connecting links in all 

 departments of Nature so essential to its understanding, and in 

 order that our heirs and descendants may the more completely 

 comprehend the history of the origin of organic life upon the face 

 of the globe and the manifold mysteries of its evolution. 



Regarding the manlike apes as our nearest relatives in tlie animal world, Dr. 

 R. Lydekker observes, in Knowledge, that the relationship is to be spoken of as 

 one of cousins and not of ancestry ; and that we should at once free ourselves 

 from any idea that there is a vestige of direct ancestral kinship between these 

 creatures and oiirselves. Such relation as does exist is of a comparatively dis- 

 tant kind; and the common ancestor must have lived ages before the mammoth 

 roamed over the plains and valleys of England, since at tliat time man was as 

 distinctly differentiated from the apes as he is in the present century. Whether 

 this " missing link " win ever turn up, or in what country it is most likely to 

 have lived, are questions impossible to answer; but from the extreme rarity with 

 which fossil remains of manlike apes are found in countries where they are 

 known to have existed for long ages, and from the probability that the distribu- 

 tional area of the aforesaid "link" was extremely limited, not much hope can be 

 given that the researches of paleontologists will ever be rewarded by such a find. 



M. MoissAN has found, in his electrical furnace, that ([iiite as distinct chemical 

 actions go on in molten ciist iron as those with which the chemist has long been 

 familiar in aqueous solutions at ordinary temperature-^. The actions are often 

 very complex, because of the faculty which iron has of retaining many compounds 

 as impurities. Tlie author has precipitated carbon and carbide of iron in fusions 

 by means of boron and silicon ; all these substances behaving in the liquid iron 

 precisely as the substances witli which we deal in a similar manner behave in 

 water. 



