260 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



" are as much products of animal life as the peat-bogs are prod- 

 ucts of vegetable life." We get an idea of the comprehensiveness 

 of his view of Nature when we consider the attention he gave, 

 soon after his return from the voyage around the world, to so 

 comparatively insignificant objects as the North German peat- 

 bogs. The opinion, based upon an observation of Alexander von 

 Humboldt, then prevailed, and was held by Leopold von Buch, 

 that such bogs as that of Linum, near Berlin, contained remains 

 of a sea-weed (Fucus saccharinus), and were, therefore, to be 

 regarded as of marine origin. After an examination, which he 

 began at Linum with Poggendorff and Friedrich Hoffmann, and 

 continued alone at Riigen and along the Baltic coast, Chamisso 

 supplied the proof that the sea had had no part, either in the 

 interior or on the coast, in the formation of peat, and that no 

 change in the relative level of land and water need be supposed 

 to explain the process. Chamisso saw again at the peat-bog of 

 Linum the Kimming, or mirage, which had prominently exhib- 

 ited itself to him in the high north. He attached to this observa- 

 tion a less known remark, which I recollect having heard in Paul 

 Erman's Lectures, that the mirage can be seen in vertical planes 

 on long, straight, sunny walls, like the old city wall of Berlin 

 between the Potsdam and Halle Gates. 



Chamisso's zoological observations were by no means limited 

 to the lower forms. He regarded the vertebrates of all latitudes 

 with equally earnest attention the flying-fish ; the birds that 

 rested on the Rurik ; the whales, which he dreamed of taming and 

 training to service ; and the sea-lions, through a bellowing herd 

 of which he walked fearlessly on St. George's Island. He made 

 profound psychological observations on the monkeys that were 

 taken on the Rurik. He also had an eye for extinct animals. A 

 tusk which was dug up at Kotzebue Sound was referred by Cuvier 

 in the Ossements fossils, on the evidence of his drawing and de- 

 scription, to the mammoth. 



But, as we have already observed, Chamisso gave special atten- 

 tion on his voyage to the study of man himself. Of course, exact 

 observations and determinations of the physical constitution of 

 men coming up to present ideas on the subject were not to be 

 expected from him, although he collected skulls; and he must 

 have been overtaken many times in details by the growth of com- 

 merce in the last seventy years, and the more perfected methods 

 of research, like anthropometry, plaster-molding, and photogra- 

 phy. But he still stands the author who, through his distinction 

 between the two chief provinces of the great ocean and a separate 

 group of islands, first cast light on the mixture of peoples who 

 dwell in the island world. Thus, according to Bastian, the dis- 

 tinction of Micronesia from Polynesia was first indicated by 



