574 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



jurious insects, while the vegetable food it 

 consumes is of little value to man. The 

 greatest sin we can lay at its door is the dis- 

 semination of poison ivy. The hairy wood- 

 pecker probably ranks next in point of use- 

 fulness. It eats many beetles and caterpil- 

 lars, few ants, a trifling amount of grain, and 

 for fruits it seeks the forests and swamps, 

 where it finds wild cherries, grapes, and the 

 berries of dogwood and Virginia creeper. It 

 scatters fewer seeds of the poison ivy and 

 poison sumac than the downy woodpecker. 

 The flicker eats more of ants than of any 

 other kind of insects, and very little corn, 

 while fruit constitutes about one fourth its 

 fare, " but the bird depends on Nature and 

 not on man to furnish the supply." Not one 

 of these three birds shows a questionable 

 trait, and they should be protected and en- 

 couraged in every possible way. The red- 

 head woodpecker has a pronounced taste for 

 beetles of very large size. Unfortunately, 



however, its fondness for predaceous beetles 

 must be reckoned against it. It leads in the 

 consumption of grasshoppers, has a taste, 

 but not a very damaging one, for grain, eats 

 largely of wild fruit, and also partakes rather 

 freely of cultivated varieties, especially of 

 the apple ; and in some places feeds exten- 

 sively on beechnuts. The red- bellied wood- 

 pecker is more of a vegetarian than any of 

 the others, but, on the other hand, eats many 

 ants and beetles. The yellow-bellied wood- 

 pecker seems to show only one questionable 

 trait, in a fondness for the sap and inner 

 bark of trees. This, comparatively harmless 

 in the forest, may be a serious matter in or- 

 chards. The pileated woodpecker is more 

 exclusively a forest bird than any of the 

 others, and its food consists of such elements 

 as the woods afford, particularly the larvae of 

 wood-boring beetles and wild fruits. This 

 species is emphatically a conservator of the 

 forests. 



MINOR PARAGRAPHS. 



War is defined by M. Ch. Letourneau, 

 in his book on the subject, as having rob- 

 bery for its object and murder as its means. 

 The author's other numerous books are about 

 the evolution of some social factor or an- 

 other, but he does not treat of the evolution 

 of war because, he avers, there is, funda- 

 mentally, no evolution of war. It is simply 

 a return to the condition of savagery, an 

 unchaining of all the bloodthirsty inclina- 

 tions, an awakening of all ferocious appetites 

 such, he says, war has been in the past, 

 and such it is destined to be in the future. 

 The handling of the transportable material, 

 the conditions accompanying preparation, 

 strategic ingenuity, skill in the conduct of 

 the campaign, diplomacy in fixing the lot of 

 the vanquished these accompaniments of 

 war have been subjects of evolution; but 

 all war is, and remains, in itself the apolo- 

 getic manifestation of force the most fla- 

 grant of all crimes that of lese humanity. 



Wooden fishhooks are still in use in 

 the waters of the regions around Bordeaux, 

 France. Two kinds of different types are 

 described. The hain is a small piece of 

 broom-wood, spindle-shaped, sharp at both 

 ends and swelled in the middle, about an 



inch long, and borne by a fishing line tied to 

 the middle. The clabeon is a little shorter 

 piece, of hawthorn, pointed at the lower end, 

 with a thorn attached and projecting later- 

 ally from the upper end. The fishing line is 

 double, and is fastened to the lower end of 

 the stick and then looped around the base 

 of the thorn. These hooks are in the forms 

 of the most primitive times. Precisely sim- 

 ilar ones to the hain, but of bone, have been 

 found at the Robenhausen lake station of 

 Wangen, and others of ivory at the cave of 

 Pair-non-Pair, in the Gironde. The other 

 one, the clabeon, is like the thorned fish- 

 hooks made by the Sakaya negritoes of the 

 Malay Peninsula. 



It is observed, in Knowledge, by Mr. 

 Vaughan Cornish that while every one is 

 familiar with the work of the breakers in 

 tearing down cliffs and grinding the frag- 

 ments into shingle and sand, it may easily 

 escape notice that the formation of cliffs is 

 also the work of the sea. The space through 

 which the breakers act is chiefly that be- 

 tween high and low water mark, between 

 which a sloping shore is cut away so as to 

 form a nearly flat beach, terminated by a 

 cliff. In point of fact, the destruction and 



