684 '^HE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



confess to a strong bias in its favor ; we may recollect that discern- 

 ing men, when the great literary preeminence of Germany is talked 

 of in their presence, have been wont to point with pride to the broad 

 diffusion of pure literary interest through the upper strata of our 

 society, quite independent of any profession or hope of emolument, 

 and challenge one to find the like in foreign lands ; and we may judge 

 from such indications as I have spoken of, and doubt if this superiority 

 is as noticeable as ever. Again, we may feel, besides this, that to 

 bring up a boy in ignorance or contempt of reading is, from many 

 points of view, a deplorable error. Non-reading parents, we may 

 think, do not know what it is they are keeping from their son ; how 

 they are depriving him of a great safeguard against temptation in his 

 youth, and a lasting resource against weariness in his maturer age. 

 They can not know what it is for harassed minds to be able to turn 

 to literature and find there a refreshment that never fails in the midst 

 of petty worries or heavy affliction, and, not knowing this, they tell 

 him that he can do without reading, as if it were a thing of little worth. 

 All this we may feel, but it is only a matter of opinion ; our point of 

 view just now may be thought peculiar ; anyhow, we readily admit 

 numberless other methods of awakening in a boy a genuine interest in 

 one, at least, of the multitudinous forms of intellectual life which ex- 

 pand daily around him. There is no excuse for sending a boy to school 

 with a disposition framed for frivolity, with idle instincts to be freshly 

 infused by every holiday-time ; whenever it so happens, something has 

 gone wrong which need not have done so, and yet so it happens in 

 thousands of cases every year. Parents do not do this designedly. It 

 is not easy to realize at once that a boy requires incessant support if 

 he is to overcome his natural antipathy to learning anything, and cer- 

 tainly they have very little idea what are the dangers attendant on an 

 idle school career. Anyhow, the result is an influx into so many schools 

 of boys bred up to a spirit of inertia, and encouraged hence to nour- 

 ish it. From this unwise preparatory training the unruly growth of 

 athleticism has sprung." 



THE MATAMATA. 



By E. SAUVAGE. 



PIERRE BARRi^RE, in an essay on the natural history of the 

 equatorial possessions of France, written in 1741, described a 

 tortoise of a singular form which the Indians of Guiana called the 

 raparara. It had, he said, a long, wrinkled neck, from which hung 

 small membranes, ragged or slashed like a fringe ; its head was flat- 

 tened and triangular, and ended in a kind of trunk shaped like a quill- 



