6/4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



these metliods or the men who use them. The climate in which 

 they live and the circumstances which have produced and re- 

 tained these methods are so entirely different from our climate 

 and our surroundings that any criticism from our standpoint 

 would almost necessarily be unjust. The lack of capital and the 

 lack of common roads are serious matters, no doubt, but they are 

 not insuperable difficulties. Insect plagues that destroy from a 

 fourth to a half of their crops are great drawbacks, but such 

 questions should be regarded, not as visitations of God, before 

 which man is powerless, but as practical matters to be met and 

 dealt with as our planters are meeting and dealing with similar 

 plagues in this country. 



DARWINISM IN THE NURSERY. 



By LOUIS KOBINSON, M. D. 



WITHIN quite recent times we have learned that such seem- 

 ingly trivial things as nursery rhymes and fairy tales are 

 of the greatest importance in illustrating some points of the his- 

 tory and affinities of the human race, and also, in a less degree, in 

 indicating the character of the ideas of our early ancestors con- 

 cerning the forces and phenomena of Nature. 



The value of the intense conservatism of the nursery in thus 

 preserving for us, in an almost unchanged form (like ants in the 

 resin of the Tertiary epoch or mammoths in the frozen tundra of 

 the Quaternary), relics of the thoughts and customs of long ago 

 has only begun to be appreciated ; and doubtless if the nursery 

 were less of a close preserve to the poachers and priers of science, 

 and, like the beehive and the ant-hill, were available for purposes 

 of investigation or experiment, we might considerably add to our 

 knowledge concerning the history and habits of primitive man. 

 At present there is a gap between embryology and anthropology 

 which has never been filled up ; and, oddly enough, with one or 

 two exceptions, there have been hitherto no attempts to make use 

 of the abundant material close at hand for the purpose of filling 

 it. In this essay I propose to bring forward a few results of re- 

 searches that have been carried out during several years under 

 rather unusually favorable circumstances, in the hope that in some 

 humble degree I may contribute to this end. 



Some of the results obtained have been extraordinary, and the 

 hesitation with which they have been received by some of my 

 friends well versed in physiology and anthropology shows that 

 hitherto the facts have escaped attention. They are, however, 

 easily verified, and in several instances a single experiment per- 

 formed in presence of a skeptic has cut short the controversy in a 



