686 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



as Tylor and most of our anthropologists believe, man's first ideas 

 of a spirit world arose from dreams. We know that most of our 

 domestic animals dream, as is proved by their movements while 

 asleep, and the same thing has also been observed in monkeys. 

 The effect of the position of the body during sleep upon the char- 

 acter of our dreams is too well known to require comment, for 

 probably every one of my readers has experienced the very disa- 

 greeable results of sleeping on the back. 



Now, if the first glimmerings of another world came to early 

 man through dreams, in which he saw his comrades, or enemies, 

 long since dead, reappear just as in life, though mixed up with 

 much that was incongruous and incomprehensible, it would seem 

 as if the period during which man first adopted the dorsal decubi- 

 tus might have been an epoch-making time in his raw theology. 



Devils and devil-worship might easily have originated from a 

 nightmare ; and since even dogmas have pedigrees and are subject 

 to the laws of evolution, it is perhaps no very wild suggestion 

 that some of the more somber tenets of our gentle nineteenth- 

 century creeds may owe their embryonic beginnings to the sleep- 

 ing attitude of some palaeolithic divine who had gorged himself in 

 an unwise degree with wild-boar Resh.— Nineteenth Century. 



SKETCH OF WILLIAM FERREL. 



By Prof. WILLIAM M. DAVIS. 



SIXTY years ago, the study of meteorology gained a notable 

 impetus from the discoveries then recently made concerning 

 the phenomena of storms. The tempestuous winds had been 

 called to order by the investigations of Dov^ and Redfield, fol- 

 lowed by those of Reid, Piddington, and others in the succeeding 

 decades, and even the literary quarterlies contained reviews of 

 books treating revolving gales. But at that time the understand- 

 ing of the general circulation of the atmosphere about the earth 

 had hardly advanced from its position early in the eighteenth 

 century, when Hadley first and incompletely explained the oblique 

 course of the trade-winds, as a consequence of their motion upon 

 a rotating globe. In the middle of our century, Dov^, then the 

 leader of European meteorologists, taught that all our northeast 

 winds were portions of the return current from the poles, whose 

 battling with the equatorial current gave us our alternations of 

 wind and weather in the temperate zone. In this country, the 

 most commonly accepted explanation of atmospheric circulation 

 was derived from Maury's fascinating Physical Geography of 

 the Sea — a book whose erroneous teachings concerning the source 



