NOTES. 



863 



dreamed at the beginning of the French 

 Revolution ; and the agents of that revolu- 

 tion were for the most part peasants and 

 artisans entirely innocent of book learning, 

 who, even in Paris, were accustomed to have 

 their wild newspapers read to them ; ... it 

 was before her people were educated that 

 Prussia conceded the agrarian law on which 

 her state has ever since been organized, and 

 which her people certainly regarded as their 

 short cut to happiness. On the other hand, 

 the effect of John Knox's system of educa- 

 tion in Scotland has been to make the coun- 

 try north of the Tweed for two hundred 

 years singularly averse to social dreams ; 

 while the Prussians, educated for seventy 

 years two clear generations have been the 

 gravest and most sensible and self-sacrificing 

 people of the continent. We question if, 

 even in England, the people are half as 

 dreamy as they were in 1830, when they 

 were profoundly ignorant, or if the French 

 working class, socialist as it is, is half as 

 confident of Utopia as it was forty-five years 

 ago. The American school system, which 

 extends everywhere, has produced a race 

 whose special characteristic is sense so hard 

 that they bear the most provoking evidence 

 of the tendency of wealth to accumulate in 

 few hands without interfering, and shoot 

 down the uneducated foreigners who form 

 the strength of their anarchist party with 

 a decision which, at all events, is far re- 

 moved from dreaminess." 



NOTES. 



AN interesting study is published by J. 

 Walter Fewkes of the legend of the destruc- 

 tion of the Tusayan pueblo of Awatobi cur- 

 rent among the Hopi Indians, and of his 

 researches on the site of the pueblo for the 

 illustration and verification of the story. The 

 destruction was effected by the Hopis about 

 the beginning of the eighteenth century. The 

 investigation was carried on in connection 

 with the Hemenney Southwestern Archaeo- 

 logical Expedition. 



VERTICAL writing, which was described 

 and illustrated in the November Popular Sci- 

 ence Monthly, has already gained a foothold 

 in Canada, and is attracting considerable at- 

 tention in the United States. The Educa- 

 tional Review (St. John, N. B.) states that 

 Mr. A. F. Newlands, supervisor of penman- 

 ship in the public schools of Kingston, On- 

 tario, introduced it into the schools of that 



town a year ago. It is also taught and fa- 

 vored in many schools of Montreal and To- 

 ronto. It has been given the preference in 

 the public-school system of Nova Scotia, 

 having entirely displaced sloping writing in 

 Halifax. It is also taught in the Halifax 

 Ladies' College. Among the librarians of 

 the United States it is no new thing, having 

 been adopted several years ago by many of 

 them for writing catalogue cards on account 

 of its superior legibility. 



DARWIN appears, from a communication 

 in Nature by Mr. Kumusagu Minakata, to 

 have been anticipated more than a thousand 

 years in announcing the theory of the adap- 

 tation of the color of animals to that of their 

 surroundings, by Twang-Ching-Shih, a Chi- 

 nese philosopher of the ninth century, who, 

 having described the habits of the trap-door 

 spider (or " tumbling defender ") and ob- 

 served that the lid of its nest is colored like 

 the ground, adds : " In general, birds and 

 animals necessarily conceal forms and shad- 

 ows by their assimilation with various ob- 

 jects. Consequently, a snake's color is simi- 

 lar to that of the ground, the hare in the 

 imperator grass is unavoidably overlooked, 

 and the hawk's hue agrees with that of the 

 trees." 



AN ingenious device has been contrived 

 by Dr. A. Cancani, of Italy, for registering 

 the precise time when an earthquake shock 

 occurs. The seismograph is so arranged as 

 to take an instantaneous photograph of the 

 face of a chronometer at the instant of the 

 shock. An adjustment of levers and bat- 

 teries and magnet is thrown into gear by the 

 shock, so that an incandescent electric lamp 

 is lighted automatically for about a quarter 

 of a second, while the image of the clock 

 is established upon the photographic plate. 



AN investigation has been made by H. M. 

 Bernard of the comparative morphology of 

 spiders, the results of which he hopes shortly 

 to have ready for publication. These results, 

 he represents, "go far to establish that classi- 

 fication which ranks the arachnids as an in- 

 dependent group of the tracheate arthropods, 

 as distinguished from that which would de- 

 duce them from the specialized crustacean 

 Limulm through the specialized arachnid 

 Scorpio" 



THE disappearance is reported of the 

 voles or field mice which infested the farms 

 of Scotland a year or two ago to such an ex- 

 tent that the evil they wrought and threat- 

 ened became a serious economical problem. 

 They were first observed a few years before 

 1890 ; multiplied rapidly till the summer of 



1892, when they began to decrease, and 

 ceased to be formidable in the summer of 



1893. On some farms the normal numbers 

 remain, but on others hardly one is to be 

 seen. The disappearance appears to be gen- 

 eral over the whole country. Various causes 



