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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be similarly improved ? Surely, if we only 

 have the requisite knowledge, and, taking a 

 practical view of life, could regulate our 

 domestic arrangements with some degree of 

 reason, rather than by habit, prejudice, and 

 the foolish ideas cultivated by foolish novel- 

 ists, this might be done. Probably we have 

 enough physiological knowledge to effect a 

 vast improvement in the pairing of individ- 

 uals, if we could only apply that knowledge 

 to make fitting marriages, instead of giving 

 way to foolish ideas about love and the 

 tastes of young people, whom we can hardly 

 trust to choose their own bonnets. 



The Place of Geography in Sehool- 

 Stndics. — The burden of General Sir F. J. 

 Goldsmid's presidential address before the 

 Geographical Section of the British Asso- 

 ciation was, that the place which geography 

 holds among school-studies is not that which 

 it ought to hold if its uses were understood 

 and appreciated. As a matter of state and 

 public-school education, the science of geog- 

 raphy should be elevated, not degraded. It 

 should be placed on a par with classics, 

 mathematics, and history, with each and all 

 of which it has affinity. A knowledge of 

 geography is not one of those accomplish- 

 ments which will come, as it were, of them- 

 selves, or are the outcome of lightly sown 

 seeds in the home ; it will not come, like hand- 

 writing, with incidental practice, nor is it to 

 be gained by mere traveling. After a run- 

 ning review of the principal geographical 

 work of the world during the year, the speak- 

 er mentioned the east and west coasts of Af- 

 rica as two regions in which geographical 

 activity had been evinced in a remarkable 

 degree. " It is really astonishing," he said, 

 " to trace the changes in a map of Africa 

 during the last quarter of a century. Large 

 spaces that were quite blank have been filled 

 up with conspicuous delineations of mount- 

 ains, fine lines representing rivers, crossed 

 by or connected with finer lines of affluents 

 or feeders, with names, circles, and dots for 

 towns or villages. Yet, as I now contem- 

 plate that map in its latest form, it seems 

 to me that hundreds of spots visited have 

 yet to be indicated, and that the coast lines 

 of the Indian Ocean on the one side and the 

 Atlantic on the other are teeming with life 

 imported, as it were, from Europe." An 



adequate knowledge of geography combined 

 with history ought to have contributed to 

 prevent the English Government consent- 

 ing to the treaty it has made, though it is 

 still unratified, with Portugal, respecting the 

 lower Congo. While full information re- 

 specting the history and geography of such 

 important countries as Afghanistan, Beloo- 

 chistan, and Persia, is available in books, it 

 is nowhere to be found in the comprehen- 

 sive form that would necessarily be adopted 

 were geography honored with professorial 

 chairs ; but, in the absence of the appropri- 

 ate manual, search must be made in encyclo- 

 paedias, gazetteers, and volumes of history 

 and travel. 



NOTES. 



TnE question of the origin of the red 

 sunsets, which still continue to appear at 

 times, is yet a subject of discussion. The 

 theory of their being due to volcanic dust 

 in the air is still most in favor, but their 

 persistency is by some regarded as a cause 

 of objection to it. Professor Newcomb sug- 

 gests in " Nature " that, in order to reach a 

 decisive conclusion on the matter, we must 

 have observations made in regions where 

 the upper atmosphere is exceptionally free 

 from vapors and other attenuated matter, 

 and where, consequently, the advent of such 

 matter could be detected when it could not 

 be determined at other places. He names 

 the Cape of Good Hope as such a region, and 

 hopes that observers there will give special 

 attention to the investigation. 



Professor F. W. Pctnam gave, in the 

 American Association, a resume of results 

 from his explorations of burial-places, 

 mounds, and earthworks, during the past 

 twenty years, in various parts of the United 

 States. They go to show that successive 

 peoples have inhabited the several regions 

 of the country, and that the mounds were 

 made by different people at different times, 

 as evidenced by their structure and contents. 



Professor Boyd Dawkixs said, in a Brit- 

 ish Association paper on the exploration of 

 Gop Cairn, commonly known as Queen Boa- 

 dicca's tomb, and of the cave at St. Asaph, 

 that the human remains found in the cave 

 threw great light on the ethnology of the dis- 

 trict in the bronze age, and proved that in the 

 Neolithic age the population of that part of 

 Wales was of the Iberian type. All the 

 skulls were of this type save one, and that 

 possessed all the characteristics usually 

 found in a round-headed Celt of the bronze 

 age. These appeared to indicate that fusion 



