JULY 9, 1897.] 
Ocean, at the Azores, in deep water along 
the coast of Spain and from the Madeira and 
the Canaries southward along the coast of 
Africa. All of these bottles that have been 
recovered have been found on the coast of 
South America, on the Antilles, and some 
of them as far west as the mouth of the Rio 
Grande. It can be inferred from this there- 
fore, that every buoyant object which has 
been dropped into the ocean during the pres- 
ent geological epoch by prehistoric or historic 
Spaniards, Portuguese or Africans has 
found its way to America and been stranded 
somewhere between the 10th parallel south 
and the 30th parallel north. 
In the northern part of the Atlantic 
Ocean the currents run the other way and 
the mails have been delivered from America 
to Europe. In the Pacific Ocean the daily 
mails delivered on the west coast of 
America from Mount Saint Elias south- 
ward have proceeded from about the 20th 
parallel north, in the vicinity of the Malay 
Peninsula and Archipelago, thence have 
travelled through the China Sea and the 
Japanese Sea to pick up objects designed 
for the Western Hemisphere. 
In the Southern Hemisphere the mails 
travel the other way and materials con- 
signed to the Ocean Current Company were 
taken from Chili and Peru to be delivered 
upon the Easter Island and the various 
groups of Polynesia, some of them reaching 
as far as Melanesia. In addition to these 
great mail services of the Pacific there was 
a narrow strip of service called the ‘ coun- 
ter-current’ between the equator and the 
10th parallel north, the articles consigned 
to it being delivered on the west coast of 
Central America. 
In the Arctic Ocean the mails proceeded 
from west to east, passing up through 
Bering Strait, across the Pole, and finding 
their way first to east Greenland and then 
around Cape Farewell to the southwestern 
shores of that great island. The Arctic 
SCIENCE. 
51 
current from Baffin Land and northward 
brought the mails from the Eskimo area 
southward even as far as Charleston, South 
Carolina. The consequence ofsuch uninter- 
rupted communication cannot be overesti- 
mated. All who have studied the arts of 
primitive races know how quickly their 
plastic minds respond to a congenial sug- 
gestion. It would not even be necessary 
for a Chinese or Japanese vessel to bring a 
single living teacher to take part in the 
pedagogic work of instructing the West 
Coast tribes in eastern Asiatic arts. 
The recent example of a throwing stick 
which drifted from Port Clarence, south of 
Bering Strait, and was picked up on the 
shores of west Greenland by Dr. Rink, is 
one of an interrupted series of communica- 
tions between one of those great mailing 
stations and another. A second element 
in technical pedagogy has not been empha- 
sized by any modern writer, and yet it can- 
not be overlooked; and that is the survival 
of industrial processes and productions in 
the myths and traditions of wandering 
tribes, so that one of them having passed 
over a long area where a certain kind of 
activity was not demanded, and coming 
again to a place where the conditions are 
favorable to its revival, changed a song or 
an ancient tribal memory into an actual 
fact again. 
O. T. Mason. 
FIELD WORK OF THE UNITED STATES GEO- 
LOGICAL SURVEY. 
THE plans of operation of the United 
States Geological Survey for the fiscal year 
1897-1898 have been approved by the Sec- 
retary of the Interior and the work of the 
field season of 1897 has been started, the 
parties having all taken the field. The 
sums appropriated for the Survey this year 
were given in detail in a recent issue of 
ScIENCE, separate amounts being set apart 
for specific branches of work and for the 
