832 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



comprehending it, without making the necessary deductions for 

 it, and without including the important phenomenon in their cal- 

 culations. Houzeau was mistaken in affirming that the Incas 

 observed only one solstice. The historians are unanimous in de- 

 scribing a festival for each of them. We have seen, besides, that 

 two systems of observatories existed, with towers and turrets in 

 different positions, and consequently designed for the observa- 

 tion of two different solstices. 



We need not, furthermore, presume that the people had no 

 calendar, from the amantas observing the zenith passages of the 

 sun every year. The day, hour, and minute of an eclipse are fore- 

 told now ; yet astronomers are not prevented by this from study- 

 ing the different phases of the phenomena. 



The destruction of these observatories, which Garcilaso says 

 were still standing in 1560, must be regretted. Those of Quito 

 were destroyed by Sebastian Belalcazar, under pretext that they 

 prompted the natives to idolatry. Only shapeless ruins of them 

 are now to be found. The best preserved ones are at Cuzco, 

 on the Carmenca hill. The question, long asked, whether the 

 Incas used optical instruments, is now answered in the affirma- 

 tive. Mr. David Forbes has brought from Peru a silver figurine, 

 which represents a personage, probably an astronomer, holding 

 to his eye a tube which is nothing else than a telescope. The 

 figure is certainly of Peruvian origin, and dates from the period 

 of the Incas. Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from 

 the Revue Scientifique. 



IN taking the recent census of India some difficulty was experienced, according 

 to C. E. D. Black, in determining what should be regarded as a house. " The 

 variety of structure was so great that a precise definition, such as satisfied census 

 authorities in other parts of the world, became an impossibility in India. In the 

 hill tracts one meets with collections of leaf-huts that are here to-day and gone 

 to-morrow. Again, there is a portable arrangement of matting and bamboo that 

 is slung on a donkey by the vagrant classes, though sometimes stationary on the 

 outskirts of a village for months together. Then comes the more stable erection 

 for the cultivator while engaged in watching his crops, and so on to the really 

 permanent abode of the lower grades of village menials, with wattle and daub 

 walls which last for years, and a roofing of thatch or palmyra leaves, renewed as 

 necessary before each rainy season. In some parts of India a considerable space 

 is walled in with a thick hedge of thorn or rattan, and the family expands in 

 separate buildings as the sons marry, but all is considered to be a single ' house.' 

 Pitched roofs, tiled or thatched, are usual in the moister tracts; flat-topped mud 

 or brick buildings are almost universal in the dry plains of the Deccan and Upper 

 India. Climate and the scarcity or plentifulness, as the case may be, are the 

 main causes of the diversity of building; while social custom and the relative 

 prevalence of the 'joint' or 'divided' family life among the Brahmanic classes 

 often determine the interior construction and arrangement.'" 



