FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



made illegal. Let the two exist to- 

 gether, and experience will prove which 

 is the one preferred by the community. 

 I am, sir, your obedient servant, 



Frederick Brasiwell. 



5 Great George Street, Westminster, S. W., 

 March IS, IH'JO. 



P. S. — Very probably the old stalk- 

 ing-horses will be trotted out on 

 Wednesday, and the President of the 

 Board of Trade will be told of the con- 

 fusion created by the existence of mere 

 local weights and measures. I believe 

 that if those who cite these anomalies 

 were asked to give instances at various 

 dates it would be found that these local 

 weights and measures were dying out. 

 In any event they are illegal, and are 

 not obligatory upon anybody. Every 

 man can claim to deal according to the 

 standards of length, of weights, and of 

 capacity. Most certainly the introduc- 

 tion of the metric system would largely 

 add to the use of illegal weights and 

 measures, not only locally, but gener- 

 ally. If the inquiry were made in 

 France, even no farther off than Bou- 

 logne, it would be found that, in the 

 markets there, dealings are frequently 

 carried out on a local system uncon- 

 nected with the metric. — F. B. 



Variations in African Religious 

 Ideas. — Miss Kngsley observes, in her 

 West African Studies, that when you 

 are traveling from district to district 

 you can not fail to be struck by the 

 difference in character of the native re- 

 ligions you are studying, and that no 

 wandering student of the subject in 

 western Africa can avoid recognizing 

 the existence of at least four distinct 

 forms of development of the fetich idea. 

 They have every one of them the same 

 underlying idea, and yet they differ. 

 " And I believe," Miss Ivingsley says, 

 " much of the confusion which is sup- 

 posed to exist in African religious ideas 

 is a confusion only existing in the minds 

 of cabinet ethnologists from a want of 

 recognition of the fact of the existence 

 of these schools. For example, suppose 

 you take a few facts from Ellis and a 

 few from Bastian and mix, and call the 

 mixture West African religion. You do 

 much the same sort of thing as if you 

 took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works 

 and from those of some eminent Jesuit 

 and of a sound Greek churchman 



and mixed them, and labeled it Euro- 

 jiean religion. The bits would be all 

 right by themselves, but the mixture 

 would be a quaint affair." Of the four 

 main schools of fetich predicated by 

 Miss Kingsley, the Tshi and Ewe school 

 (Ellis's school) is mainly concerned 

 with the preservation of life; the Cala- 

 bar school with attempting to enable 

 the soul successfully to pass through 

 death; the Mpongwe school with the at- 

 tainment of material prosperity; and 

 the school of Nkissi with the worship 

 of the mystery of the power of evil. 



A Natural History Society as a 

 School. — Among the agencies employed 

 by the Boston Society of Natural His- 

 tory for making itself a vehicle of in- 

 struction to the public has been the em- 

 ployment of an educated man and teach- 

 er as guide to the museum, who should 

 also give lectures there. The salary of 

 this officer has heretofore been provided 

 by the bounty of Miss Harriet E. Free- 

 man, but she has been obliged to discon- 

 tinue her contribution, and the curator 

 is now seeking other means of maintain- 

 ing a suitably qualified assistant. The 

 " guide," Mr. A. W. Grabau, delivered 

 a course of lectures in April and May, 

 1897, on " The Surface of the Earth: Its 

 Rocks, Soil, and Scenery," in which spe- 

 cial attention was given to the scenery 

 in Xew England; and, whenever it was 

 practicable, excursions were made to lo- 

 calities which could be used as illustra- 

 tions. A similar course, delivered in 

 189G, resulted in the formation during 

 the summer of the same year of a class of 

 thirty persons, summer residents of Ken- 

 nebunkport, Maine, who were under 

 Mr. Grabau's daily instruction for two 

 weeks. The awakening of interest in 

 local scenery further led to his giving 

 lectures in Belmont and Arlington, and 

 he thereby became instrumental in a 

 movement intended to preserve the lo- 

 cal frontal bowlder moraine on Arling- 

 ton Heights — a valuable geological 

 movement. A course of lectures on the 

 Animals of the Shores of New England 

 was given by Mr. Grabau to a class of 

 from forty to seventy-five persons, in 

 the Teachers' School of Science, with 

 excursions on Wednesday and Saturday 

 afternoons. In a similar fall course at- 

 tention was given specially to the study 

 of animals in their various habitats. 



