November 23, 18S3.] 



SCIENCE. 



691 



{Africa.) 



Sociology of the Kabyles. — M. Sabatier, who 

 has long been a resilient of Algeria, and served as a 

 judicial officer among the Kabyles, gives the follow- 

 ing details as to their civil and social organization. 

 These people, sharply distinguished from the Arabs, 

 are of the Berber race, and number about three hun- 

 dred thousand. 



The villages are associated in governmental groups 

 of not more than twenty settlements each. Such a 

 group is termed a kabila. The supreme chief, or 

 magistrate, of the kabila, is the amin. There is always 

 another chief called ukil, charged with defending the 

 rights of the minority of the electors. In each kabila 

 the karuba, of forty or fifty male adults, forms an 

 electoral body. The right to vote, or the attainment 

 of individual majority, is decided in a singular man- 

 ner. A thread is measured off, which, when doubled, 

 shall exactly encircle the neck. This thread, made 

 single, is then passed from the occipital base of the 

 head over the cranium ; and, when the other end 

 reaches only to the chin, the development of the head 

 is supposed to be complete, and the individual politi- 

 cally mature. This ordinarily happens about the age 

 of fourteen. Each karuba has a distinct jemmaha, 

 a sort of municip.al council, presided over by a tamen. 

 The tamens, all together, form the general council of 

 the kabila, which, with the ukil and amin, forms the 

 administration. The rights of minorities in each 

 karuba are carefully guarded. The minority is called 

 the saf, and may elect a chief, who serves one day to 

 redress grievances, after which he retires to his pri- 

 vate station. They have no prisons. The grand 

 council may banish a criminal, destroy his house, 

 burn his clothing, or order him, as a last resort, to 

 be stoned to death. The council directs all munici- 

 pal matters. If hostilities break out between two 

 villages, and blood is shed, neighboring villages gen- 

 erally intervene by proclaiming anaya. This an.iya 

 is an invitation to cease hostilities, which the com- 

 batants dare not disregard. Were it disregarded, it 

 would be considered an extreme insult to the safs of 

 the peace-making villages, which all other village safs 

 would be boutui in honor to avenge. 



The family organization of the Kabyles is uniciue. 

 There is, in fact, no family, in our sense of the word. 

 Such as there is, is terminable conditionally. A Ka- 

 byle who desires a wife says to her father and brother, 

 ' You must sell me this girl.' The price is debated, 

 and an agreement made before witnesses. Fifteen to 

 forty dollars is the usual range. The money pai<l, 

 he gives a dress to the bride, and all is done. The 

 wife may be sent back without explanation, and the 

 price reclaimed from her family. 



If the wife quarrels with her husband, she may call 

 upon a third person to proclaim anaya between them. 

 The husband may then not only reclaim his payment 

 to her family, but set on her head a price, often exor- 

 bitant, which any other lover must pay into his hands 

 before lie can take her to vyife. The woman is then 

 said to be 'retired from circulation.' 



Children, if boys, are held in honor, representing 

 one more vote and one more gun; girls must shift as 



best they may; at least half the Kabyle women live 

 by gathering sweet acorns. 



Kabyle law regulates the disposition of property. 

 If a peddler possesses a field which he cannot use on 

 account of the deniaiuis of his business upon his 

 time, the l#w obliges him to plant it with olives. The 

 properly in such matters is wonderfully divided up: 

 one man may own the fifth part of a field ; another, a 

 fifth of the crop of olives, or a third of the crop of 

 figs; still another, the third branch of the fifth olive- 

 tree, or that branch which i)oints to the east. 



In Kabylia the discoverer of a spring of water, 

 even if situated in the field belonging to another per- 

 son, owns the water from it. This tends to encour- 

 age the search for water, the most important element 

 in that arid region. The Kabyles are excellent agri- 

 culturalists. If there is a spot of earth in a chasm, 

 a Kabyle will descend by a rope and cultivate it. 

 They are extremely industrious, and work in concert. 

 In the Kabyle country, land suitable for cultivation 

 is worth eighty dollars an acre, while in the Arab 

 districts it does not average four dollars in value per 

 acre, — a difference illustrating the respective charac- 

 ters of the two races. The question of ousting the 

 Kabyles from the Land they cultivate, to make room 

 for French colonists, is being discussed in France: so 

 it would seem that the Americans are not the only 

 people capable of robbing the aborigines. — (Rev. 

 geogr., June, 1?83.) w. n. d. [393 



Columbines. — Grant AWen {North- American re- 

 view, September) traces several of the steps by which 

 the typical ranunculaceous flower has been modified 

 to form that of Aquilegia and the other more highly 

 specialized genera. The more important are the elon- 

 gation of the petal, which " is just the petal of the 

 buttercup, with the tiny depression or hollow of the 

 nectary prolonged backward into a tubular spur," as 

 a protection against small, thieving insects; and the 

 reduction in the number of carpels, without a cor- 

 responding lessening of the ovules, which insures a 

 more certain fecundation of the latter. Tlie fact that 

 A. canadensis is even more perfectly adapted to pol- 

 lination by humming-birds than by bees, seems, how- 

 ever, to have escaped him. Though more greatly 

 modified, the hooked spur of European columbines 

 is in no wise more perfectly adapted to the end it is 

 to serve than the straight spur of American species. 

 In his zeal for demonstrating the correlation of high- 

 ly specialized forms aiul colors in entomophllous 

 flowers, the writer is also led to ignore such species 

 as the common European Aconitum 'lycoctonum, 

 which, with the structure of its immediate relatives, 

 has the much less specialized yellow color of those 

 lying lower in the scale. 



Dr. Gray {Hot. (jazelte, September) calls atten- 

 tion to the longest columbine (A. longissima), a spe- 

 cies from northern Mexico, with spurs four inches or 

 more in length, and clearly adapted to profit by the 

 visits of some long-tongued hawk-moth like Ampho- 

 nyx antaeus, which occurs in the south-west, and has 

 been found by Mr. Ilenshaw to have a jiroboscis cer- 



