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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



a fit type of honesty, for it regards the 

 property of its neighbors, and will not rob. 

 Once, it is said, when an ant dropped a 

 grain of corn, a number of other ants came 

 up and smelled of it, but let it lie till the 

 owner came up and took it away. Simon 

 ben Chalaf ta, " the Experimenter," tells of 

 an experiment worthy of Lubbock. On a 

 very hot day he put a cover over an ant- 

 hill. A sentry ant came out, observed the 

 shadow, and reported upon it to his fellows. 

 They came out to enjoy the coolness of the 

 shade, when it was suddenly taken away, 

 and the insects, irritated by the burning 

 sun, fell upon the scout that had led them 

 into the trap, and killed him. The Aga- 

 dists make much of the devotion of the in- 

 dividual ant to the welfare of the whole 

 colony as a salient point of formic char- 

 aeter. Dr. Placzek suggests that Solomon 

 may have been acquainted with a kind of 

 agricultural ants from his sentence, "Pro- 

 videth her meat in the summer, and gather- 

 eth her food in the harvest," where the 

 former verb may, in analogy with other 

 cases of its use in the Bible, refer to the 

 preparation of the field. Passages are 

 quoted that point to the thought that the 

 difference in mental gifts between men and 

 animals is only quantitative. In one of the 

 books, a limit is set to the scope of scien- 

 tific investigation thus : " What is too high 

 for thee, seek not to reach; what is too 

 hard for thee, seek not to penetrate ; what 

 is incomprehensible to thee, try not to 

 know ; what remains hidden from thy mind, 

 strive not to discover. Direct thy thought 

 only to what is attainable, and trouble thy- 

 self not about hidden things." 



Geological Catastrophes. — The Duke of 

 Argyll, in his address to the Edinburgh 

 Geological Society, on its fiftieth anniver- 

 sary, took the ground that " nothing can be 

 more unphilosophical than the antithesis 

 and opposition which is set up between 

 what is called the law of continuity and 

 what is called the doctrine of catastrophes. 

 Throughout all Nature, and throughout all 

 those operations of the human intellect 

 which depend on the manipulation of natu- 

 ral forces, we see the two doctrines to be 

 perfectly harmonious — strains and tensions 

 maintaining themselves in absolute silence 



up to the bending or the breaking-point — 

 pressures pressing with tremendous but 

 noiseless energy up to the bursting point — 

 and then moments of rapid and sometimes 

 of instantaneous change. If it is irrational 

 to quote the continuity of Nature as afford- 

 ing any, even the least, presumption against 

 sudden and great effects, it is still more 

 irrational to quote it as irreconcilable with 

 effects which, though catastrophes to us, 

 whose scales of measurement are often the 

 scales of pygmies, are in reality nothing but 

 movements of infinitesimal smallness in the 

 scale of Nature. I had occasion the other 

 day, in delivering a popular lecture in Glas- 

 gow, to exhibit a section of the globe drawn 

 to the scale of one tenth of an inch to a 

 mile. On that scale, which I have taken 

 from my friend Mr. James Nasmyth, the 

 globe is represented by a circle sixty-four 

 feet in diameter, and I was able to show 

 that on that portion of the curve which rep- 

 resents one eighth of the circumference, the 

 elevation of the highest mountain in Europe, 

 Mont Blanc, was wholly invisible to the 

 spectators who were half-way down the hall, 

 and could barely be seen even by those who 

 were close at hand. The truth is, that, 

 when we come to realize the almost infini- 

 tesimal smallness of the irregularities of 

 the earth's surface as compared with its 

 circumference — the whole range from the 

 highest height to the deepest deep being 

 somewhat less than sixty thousand feet — 

 the wonder comes to be that if subterrane- 

 an forces are at work at all in modifying, 

 from time to time, the perfect smoothness 

 and sphericity of the surface, not that their 

 work should be so great, but, on the con- 

 trary, that it should be so very small." 



Causes of Typhoid Fever,— In a paper 

 published by the Iowa State Board of Health 

 on the nature, causes, and prevention of the 

 typhoid fever of America, Dr. R. J. Far- 

 quharson. Secretary of the Board, emphasizes 

 the distinction between typhus and typhoid, 

 an important point of which is, he believes, 

 that typhoid is not contagious. A number 

 of reports, American and foreign, seem to 

 concur in fixing the origin of the disease in 

 some condition of the ground or water, and 

 indicate that it may be produced by foul 

 water, by foul air, or by emanations from 



