152 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



The legality of the use of standard time was established by the de- 

 cision of Judge Holmes, of Massachusetts, that whatever time was in 

 ordinary use by the people of any community was lawful time ; and 

 his decision is not likely to be reversed. From an economic stand- 

 point it is difficult to perceive what difference it makes to a laboring- 

 man whether he commences work at a time nominally called seven 

 o'clock or half -past seven, so long as he receives full wages for a full 

 day's work. 



Some of the objections raised to the use of standard time as a sub- 

 stitute for local time are as amusing as the famous declaration of the 

 Rev. John Jasper, of Richmond, Virginia. It is urged that the sun was 

 divinely set to rule the day, and therefore to use any but solar time 

 is akin to, if not actually, immoral conduct. As the moon was also set 

 to rule the night, such persons, if logical, should obey that portion of 

 the divine command also. The fact is, that solar time was necessarily 

 abandoned when clocks came into general use, and time based upon 

 one or another arbitrary standard has governed the civilized world 

 ever since. The present system, with its widely extended uniformity, 

 simply conforms to the principle of securing the greatest good to the 

 greatest number, a principle which must everywhere in the end prevail. 



-♦»♦ 



AMERICAN ASPECTS OF ANTHROPOLOGY.* 



By EDWAKD B. TYLOE, D. C. L., F. E. S. 



OUR newly-constituted Section of Anthropology, now promoted 

 from the lower rank of a Department of Biology, holds its first 

 meetinor under remarkable circumstances. Here in America one of 

 the great problems of race and civilization comes into closer view than 

 in Europe. In England anthropologists infer from stone arrow-heads 

 and hatchet-blades, laid up in burial-mounds or scattered over the sites 

 of vanished villages, that Stone age tribes once dwelt in the land ; 

 but what they were like in feature and complexion, what languages 

 they spoke, what social laws and religion they lived under, are ques- 

 tions where speculation has but little guidance from fact. It is very 

 different when under our feet in Montreal are found relics of a people 

 who formerly dwelt here, Stone age people, as their implements show, 

 though not unskilled in barbaric arts, as is seen by the ornamentation 

 of their earthen pots and tobacco-pipes, made familiar by the publica- 

 tions of Principal Dawson. As we all know, the record of Jacques Car- 

 tier, published in the sixteenth-century collection of Ramusio, proves 



* Vice-President's address to the Section of Anthropologry of the British Association 

 at the Montreal meeting. 



