FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



141 



animals are gradually becoming rare, but it 

 is through the growth of settlement rather 

 than by the operation of bounties ; and Iowa, 

 Minnesota, and South Dakota have tried to 

 rid their lands of pocket gophers and ground 

 squirrels by offering bounties, " but the effect 

 of the law was far more evident on the 

 county treasuries than on the animals." 



Aneient Monnments of Ceylon. — An ink- 

 ling to the character and extent of the an- 

 cient cities and architectural monuments 

 buried in the forests of that island is given 

 in Mr. H. W. Cave's book on The Ruined 

 Cities of Ceylon, but yet the author has to 

 confess that he has only touched " the merest 

 fringe of the great subject." The works 

 of which they are examples were compar- 

 able with other massive works of antiquity, 

 and such as we could not imagine the mod- 

 ern Ceylonese capal^le of constructing, and 

 that the ancestors of these people should 

 have been competent to execute them is hard 

 to conceive. They are, however, like other 

 Buddhist art, rather monotonous, repeating 

 the same motives. A single exception to 

 this rule is the crag of Sigiri, where King 

 Kasyapa secured himself as in an impreg- 

 nable fortress after he had by his crimes 

 made his life among the people unpleasant 

 and dangerous. He carried a spiral stairway 

 around the precipitous sides of the rock to 

 the summit, surrounded it with a strong ram- 

 part, collected his wealth and treasure there, 

 and built a palace and offices. There he 

 lived in great luxury. The rock rises abrupt- 

 ly from the plain, and has an artificial lake 

 on its west side. Traces of massive stone 

 walls inclosing about fifty acres are visible 

 around its base ; within these terraces, de- 

 fenses, and the foundations of buildings are 

 marked. Parts of the spiral galleries of 

 ascent are well preserved. On the top of 

 the rock ruins have been found that be- 

 long to two periods at least. Only small 

 parts of the ruins of the huge cities of Anad- 

 hurapa and Polanaruwa have been recovered 

 from the jungle, and "other remains of a 

 glorious past are scattered here and there all 

 over the island." The " moonstones " are a 

 peculiar feature of Singhalese architecture, 

 and constitute the doorstep to the principal 

 entrance of a building. They are floridly 

 ornamented, and look very much like a door 



mat laid at the foot of a staircase. The 

 carving of one specimen described by Mr. 

 Cave, not less than sixteen hundred years 

 old, "is as sharp and well defined as if it 

 were just from the sculptor's chisel." Works 

 on a similar scale to those of Ceylon abound 

 in Burma, Java, and Cambodia, and are all 

 attributed to the early Buddhist ancestors of 

 the present common people. Their dynasty 

 ended in Ceylon in the thirteenth century, 

 when Tamil invaders took the capital and 

 laid the whole country waste. 



Ancestral SarTivals in Domesticated Ani- 

 malSi — Dr. Louis Robinson, in a book he has 

 recently published concerning that subject, 

 goes back to their wild ancestrv for the ori- 

 gin of nearly all the traits we observe in 

 domesticated animals, giving only a minor 

 place to human selection and human train- 

 ing. Thus, as the Academy says in a review 

 of his book, he suggests that the dog could 

 never have been taught what man has taught 

 him had he been originally a solitary hunter ; 

 he was a member of a pack which co-oper- 

 ated for ccmmon purposes ; which subordi- 

 nated some individuals to others ; which had 

 division of labor and specialized functions. 

 By virtue of this fact, when man took the 

 dog into his company for a partner, the dog 

 continued to fill his accustomed place in the 

 new community. His loyalty to his master 

 and his readiness to defend hhn when at- 

 tacked are an echo of his loyalty to his 

 four-footed comrades. His work as pointer 

 or setter is the result of the habit of hunting 

 in company. To dogs man is a very superior 

 dog, a capable leader in the pack to which 

 both belong. The shying of horses is ex- 

 plained by the fact that horses descend 

 from ancestors accustomed to roam over 

 close-cropped pastures, where any tuft of 

 long grass might conceal a snake or other 

 venomous animal. Hence timidity about 

 such objects — transferred now to pieces of 

 loose paper or cabbage leaves in the road — 

 was really in the beginning a preservative 

 trait. The donkey, whose progenitors were 

 mountain beasts living among desert rocks, 

 does not shy. Pigs fatten easily, because 

 their ancestors had to eat mast in autumn 

 against the w inter fast ; and when frost 

 lasted long, the fattest wild boar would alone 

 survive to carry on the species. Cows give 



