NOTES. 



287 



Secretary and Treasurer, Dr. C. W. Dabney, 

 Jr., of North Carolina. Dr. E. H. Jenkins, 

 of Connecticut, and Dr. H. W. Wiley, of 

 Washington, were constituted the Executive 

 Committee. The annual meeting of the As- 

 sociation is to be held on the first Tuesday 

 in September. 



Tlie Esquimaux and the Cave-Mcn. — 



Professor Boyd Dawkins presented before 

 the British Association the considerations 

 in favor of his theory that the Esquimaux 

 are the survivors of the prehistoric " cave- 

 dwellers." Everywhere the Esquimaux are 

 found, he said, along the Arctic coasts of 

 Greenland and America, and into Asia, they 

 are a receding race. Mr. Dall has shown 

 that they formerly dwelt on the west coast 

 of America far south of their present abode, 

 and the speaker has found evidence of their 

 former presence south of their habitat in 

 Asia. They present the appearance of being 

 a distinct race. To find other men like them 

 we have to go back to geologic times, to the 

 cave-men, with whom they show several 

 points of resemblance. Both dressed in 

 skins and wore long gloves, were hunters 

 and fishermen, showed considerable artistic 

 taste and skill, and used implements of 

 stone and bone. The Esquimaux do not 

 bury their dead, and there are many reasons 

 for believing that the cave-men did not. 

 Other speakers questioned the force of Pro- 

 fessor Dawkins's arguments. They held that 

 the human remains found with the cave- 

 dwellers' relics, which Professor Dawkins 

 regarded as intrusive, were genuine, and 

 that they represented a different physical 

 structure from that of the Esquimaux ; that 

 other traits, insisted upon as common, were 

 not peculiar to these two peoples alone ; and 

 that the reason the Esquimaux do not bury 

 their dead is simply because the conditions 

 of the climate do not often allow it. Lieu- 

 tenant P. H. Ray gave reasons for believing 

 that the Esquimaux had occupied the far 

 north of America from a remote period. 

 Snow-goggles, like those now in use, have 

 been dug up twenty-eight feet below the 

 surface of the ground. Mr. Ray believed 

 the Esquimaux to be a people of the ice, 

 living from extreme antiquity along the ice- 

 border, and following it as it advanced or 

 receded. He considered them distinct from 

 the Indians in physical traits and in charac- 



ter, as well as in language. They were nat- 

 urally a peaceful people, very superstitious, 

 but without a distinct religion, and with- 

 out the conception of a future existence. 

 They did not bury their dead because the 

 climate rendered it usually impossible, but 

 merely conveyed the corpse to a distance 

 from the village, and left it to be devoured 

 by the dogs. That, they said, was the end of 

 man. But they had ideas about a superior 

 Being, who had created men and animals, 

 and believed in an evil spirit. 



NOTES. 



From papers read in the British Associa- 

 tion, it appears that the most importaut coal- 

 fields in the Acadian or St. Lawrence basin 

 are those of Cumberland, Pictou, and Cape 

 Breton. The other coal-regions of the Do- 

 minion are one extending from the ninety- 

 seventh parallel to the base of the Rocky 

 Mountains, and one on Vancouver's Island. 

 Of the three fields, the first is in the carbon- 

 iferous, while the other two belong to the 

 secondary or tertiary formations. 



M. V. Magniant writes to the " Revue 

 Scientifique " that he has a cat which shows 

 signs of intelligent reflection. Not only 

 does it look behind the mirror for the cat 

 which it sees reflected in the glass, but it 

 has been caught several times attentively 

 regarding a sculptured cat's head that hangs 

 on the wall. It would get upon the back of 

 a chair, and then stand up and stretch out 

 its paw to touch the image of itself. It has 

 outgrown the sports of kittenhood, but when 

 it is asked in the morning if it is hungry it 

 emits two sounds, that clearly moan yes, with 

 an articulation that is never heard under any 

 other circumstances. It loves flowers, not 

 eating them, but inhaling their perfume with 

 a visible satisfaction. 



MiNiNO - Engineer Wenzel Poech, of 

 Austria, has discovered a simple, cheap, and 

 practicable means of preserving mineral coal 

 from deterioration in the open air, where 

 it is liable to crumbling, and oftentimes to 

 spontaneous combustion. It consists prin- 

 cipally in treating the coal-pile with steam 

 for the exclusion of the air, and securing a 

 permanent retention of moisture by the 

 coal. The thcoi-y of the process is that the 

 deterioration of coal is caused by its absorp- 

 tion of oxygen and other gases, for which 

 the way is opened by the evaporation of the 

 hygroscopic moisture. If the coal is kept 

 full of water, this can not happen. 



Professor Archibald stated, in the Brit- 

 ish Association, that the " Krakatoa com- 

 mittee " had succeeded in collecting much 



