July 12, 1889.] 



SCIENCE. 



21 



mum by pointed cars splitting the air in front, and preventing 

 suction in the rear, while in transit ; reducing the cross-section of 

 cars to a minimum, and enclosing the wheels and electrical 

 equipment within the walls of the same to offer as little resistance 

 to the air as possible ; telescoping the cars of a train to present 

 to the air an unbroken surface ; special switch for rails ; keeping 

 the centre of gravity of the whole train below the axles. Patents 

 have also been secured for a passenger system which applies to 

 the conversion of existing steam railroads into electric railroads, 

 which cover the only safe mode of rapid transit for passengers. 



A series of experiments have been made at Laurel, Md., to show 

 what the Weems railway system will do. This experimental line 

 is a circuit of exactly two miles. Over this route there are 29 

 changes of grade, some of them very heavy, even to the extent of 

 108 feet to the mile. The generating plant there contains all the 

 electrical appliances necessary to the attainment of high speed by 

 a railroad-train. There is also special machinery for experimenta- 

 tion, and the perfecting of all mechanical and electrical inventions 

 tending to advance and improve the system. All tests of speed 

 have been made upon heavy grades and curves combined, too great 

 ever to be required in the construction of a commercial line : 

 therefore the experiments demonstrate the high rate of speed which 

 will be obtained upon lines built for business puposes. At this 

 experiment station 2 miles per minute are made around a heavy 

 curve, or the equivalent of 180 miles an hour, or 3 miles a minute, 

 on a level track. Prior to the inauguration of this system, 20 miles 

 per hour was the fastest time ever made by any kind of electrical 

 railroad travel. 



At the experiment station there are no extensive works ; and the 

 motor-car, when it comes out from under its shed in obedience to 

 the will of the engineer in the distant plant building where the 

 electric dynamo generates the current, moves deliberately, slowly, 

 and with absence of all sound. This cigar-shaped car, painted a 

 bright red and moving sharp end foremost, at first sight does not 

 seem a wonderful thing as it goes quietly along the track ; but 

 later, when the engineer at the dynamo puts on more power, 

 or, as a steam-car man would say, more steam, and the creeping 

 thing on the ground hastens its movement until it fairly flies, and 

 becomes a moving speck of red, spectators feel the progress being 

 made in applied science, and talk of the wonders of electricity, 

 and the great things it will accomplish in the active affairs of 

 life in the near future. All who have witnessed the successful 

 trials at Laurel are impressed with the great stride made in the 

 matter of rapid transit by electricity. 



Arrangements are now being made for the building of an ex- 

 tended road between distant cities, and Baltimore will be one of 

 the stopping-points on the line. 



The officers of the Electro-Automatic Transit Company of Bal- 

 timore City are Dr. Julian J. Chisolm, president ; O. J. Smith of 

 New York, vice-president ; Alex. Brown, treasurer ; William M. 

 Pegram, secretary ; David G. Weems, general manager ; J. J. 

 Chisolm, Edward B. Bruce, B. F. Gambrill, O. J. Smith, Robertson 

 Taylor, Franklin J. Morton, Alex. Brown, S. E. George, William M. 

 Pegram, Edwin F^ Abell, David G. Weems, directors. 



Mr. David G. Weems of Baltimore is the inventor of the system. 

 Mr. O. J. Smith, the vice-president, is president of the American 

 Press Association of New York. The officers of the company have 

 made frequent visits to witness the various trials, and with each 

 successful increase of speed made have enlarged their expectations 

 of future results. 



WHO ARE THE AMERICAN INDIANS .' 1 

 When Columbus discovered America, he discovered not only a 

 new continent, but a new people, — the American Indians. From 

 one end to the other of its broad expanse the continent was occu- 

 pied by Indian tribes that had held the land from time immemorial, 

 — so far, at least, as their own traditions aver, — knowing nothing 

 of any country but their own. The commonly presented picture 

 of the Indians as they appeared at the time of the discovery is that 

 of a horde of wandering savages, half or wholly naked, living on 

 roots and herbs, or existing by the capture of wild animals scarcely 



1 Abstract of a lecture delivered in the National Museum, Washington, D.C., 

 March 30, 1S89, by H. W. Henshaw. 



more savage than themselves, and the chief object of whose exist- 

 ence was to enslave, to torture, and to kill each other. Those who 

 hold such opinions have ever taken a hopeless view of the Indian's 

 present, and a still more hopeless view of his future. Such a pic- 

 ture conveys a totally false impression of the Indian, and of the 

 state of culture to which he had attained at the era of the dis- 

 covery. Though still living in savagery, he was in the upper con- 

 fines of that estate, and was fast pressing upon the second stage of 

 progress, — that of barbarism ; that is to say, he had progressed 

 far beyond and above the lowest states in which man is known to 

 live, to say nothing of the still lower conditions from which he must 

 have emerged, and had travelled many steps along the long and 

 difficult road to civilization. 



Already he had become skilful in the practice of many arts. 

 Though the skins of beasts furnished a large part of his clothing, 

 he had possessed himself of the weaver's art ; and from the hair of 

 many animals, from the down of birds, and from the fibres of many 

 plants, he knew how to spin, to weave, and to dye fabrics. Basket- 

 making he had carried to so high a degree of perfection that little 

 further improvement was possible. The potter's art also was his ; 

 and, though his methods were crude and laborious, the results 

 achieved, both as regards grace of form and ornamentation, may 

 well excite admiration at the present day. 



Copper had been discovered, and was mined and roughly beaten 

 into shape to serve for ornament, and, to some slight extent, for 

 mechanical use. In Mexico and Peru, gold, silver, and copper were 

 worked ; and many authors contend that the method of making 

 bronze, an invention fraught with tremendous possibilities, had 

 there been discovered. 



In much of South and Central America, Mexico, and the eastern 

 parts of the United States, so important an advance had been made 

 in agriculture that it furnished a very large part of the food-supply, 

 and it should not be forgotten that the chief product of the Indian's 

 tillage, maize or Indian-corn, which to-day furnishes a large part 

 of the world's food, was the gift of the Indian to civilization. A 

 scarcely less important contribution to mankind is the potato, the 

 cultivation of which also originated with the Indians. A third im- 

 portant agricultural product, though less beneficial, is tobacco, the 

 use and cultivation of which had been discovered centuries before 

 the advent of the European. 



"Architecture" may seem like a large word to apply to the 

 dwellings of the Indians ; nevertheless many of their houses were 

 more substantial and comfortable than is generally supposed, while 

 in the North-west many tribes reared dwellings of hewn planks, 

 sometimes as large as 210 feet long by 30 feet wide, which were 

 capable of accommodating several hundred individuals. More pre- 

 tentious and durable were the communal houses of mud and stone 

 reared by the pueblo people of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico ; 

 while farther south, in Central and South America, were edifices of 

 hewn stone, which from their dimensions, the size of some of the 

 blocks contained in them, and the extent and ornate character of 

 the ornamentation, justly excite the wonder and admiration of the 

 traveller and archaeologist. 



The advantages of a beast of burden had been perceived, and, 

 though the human back furnished by far the greater part of the 

 transportation, yet in North America the dog had been trained into 

 an affective ally, and in the Andes the llama performed a similar 

 office. Insignificant as was the use of the dog as a carrier, its em- 

 ployment cannot well be overestimated as a step in progress, when 

 it is remembered that the plain's tribes that most employed it lived 

 in the midst of the buffalo, — an animal which must have become of 

 prime domestic importance in the never-to-be-enacted future of the 

 Indian. 



The need of some method of recording events and communi- 

 cating ideas had been felt, and had given rise, even among the 

 ruder tribes, to picture-writing, which in Mexico and Central 

 America had been so far developed into ideographs, popularly 

 called hieroglyphics, as to hint strongly at the next stage, the inven- 

 tion of a true phonetic alphabet. Nay, more : the Mexicans and 

 Mayas are believed to have reached a state of true phonetic writ- 

 ng, where characters were made to represent not things, as true 

 deographic writing, but the names of things and even of abstract 

 deas ; and this is a stage which may be said to be on the very 



