256 



[Vol. XXII. No. 562 



resiJonding increase of any particular species of noxious 

 insects. That is a point for the entomologist to decide 

 for us. 



What comparatively few birds are gathered in for sci- 

 entific purposes, I am strongly of the opinion, has but 

 very little influence either one way or the other upon 

 bird increase or decrease. Take a city like Chicago, for 

 example, and its extreme suburban environs; how few, 

 indeed, in i^roportion to her population, are there of her 

 inhabitants who collect in the neighborhood birds for 

 scientific purposes ! In the course of a collecting season 

 how many young scientific ornithologists in Chicago go 

 out into her suburbs to collect birds ? Not in any suffi- 

 cient numbers, I warrant, to have any material effect 

 upon the decrease of native birds. The same suggestion 

 is ap23licable to other large towns and cities in the United 

 States and Territories. When one comes to think of the 

 millions of birds that pass over the country during the 

 vernal or autumnal migrations every year, and then come 

 to compare that host with all that has been deducted 

 from it during the last century, as represented by all the 

 birds actually existing in scientific collections, the loss is 

 hardly worthy of mention. Moreover, more than half of 

 our scientific avian collectors do not collect in the sub- 

 urban districts but go far from the habitations of men, 

 and so their work cannot be said to affect the question at 

 all. 



But there is a cause in my opinion, however, for the 

 scarcity of our native birds in and about cities and large 

 towns of this country, before which all other reasons we 

 have mentioned stand absolutely aghast. It is the whole- 

 sale destruction carried on by the army of unscrupulous 

 small boys in any particular place. I am the more con- 

 vinced of this from my observations in and about Wash- 

 ington, D. C, during the past four years. This active 

 destruction has been made possible by the numerous 

 comparatively recent and cheap inventions in the way of 

 air and spring-guns, as well as cheap rifles of small cali- 

 bre, also other fatal contrivances that will noiselessly 

 throw missiles of a variety of kinds with great accuracy. 

 Hundreds of those guns are sold annually to boys, and 

 the latter never seem to tire of strolling about orchards 

 and hedge-rows and knocking over dozens upon dozens 

 of birds with them. One day last spring I met one such 

 youngster, and upon examining his game-bag found it 

 absolutely crammed full of dead birds which he had 

 killed since starting out in the morning. One item alone 

 consisted of seventy-two ruby and golden-crowned king- 

 lets. The same fellow boasted of having slain over one 

 hundred cat-birds that season. Boys get to be wonder- 

 fullv expert shots with the kind of guns to which I refer, 

 and as the ammunition costs little or nothing, and a great 

 quantity can be carried at a time, it is easy to be seen 

 that between the wholesale slaughter they can and do 

 commit, in addition to keeping the remaining birds per- 

 petually alarmed, it is no wonder that they are soon 

 driven away from the neighborhood of our cities and 

 country seats. 



There are ample legal measures within our power to 

 enforce, to prevent this cause of bird decrease, especially 

 if the fathers of those boys are held responsible, and I 

 would suggest that it be the sense of this congress that 

 such measures will be recommended to the various State 

 legislators hereafter that will have the tendency to thor- 

 oughly discourage such practices. 



A NEW THERMOELECTEIC PHENOMENON. 



BY W. HUET STEELE, M. A., MELBOUBNE HNIT'EBSITY. 



It IS stated in many text-books, and pretty generally 

 known, that electric currents may be produced by heating 



a single metal, if there be any variation in temper, or if 

 the distribution of heat be very irregular and the changes 

 of temperature abrupt. These effects are generally sup- 

 posed to be exceedingly small compared with ordinary 

 thermoelectric effects, but some exjaeriments performed 

 by the writer in the Physical Laboratory of the Univer- 

 sity of Melbourne show that at high temperatures these 

 effects are sometimes exceedingly large, as great or 

 greater than that given by a junction of antimony and 

 bismuth at the same temperature. At low temperatures 

 this is most aj)parent in iron wires, iron being the only 

 metal in which I could observe the effect at a tempera- 

 ture below lOO^C. If a piece of iron wire be put in cir- 

 cuit with a very sensitive galvanometer and gently heated 

 irregular currents will flow, sometimes one way, some- 

 times the other, rising and falling in an apparently arbi- 

 trary manner. I several times observed the effect simply 

 by warming the wire with my fingers. At a red heat the 

 effect is much more marked and also much more irregu- 

 lar. The effect in iron, however, is not so great as in 

 some other metals at a high temperature, the highest 

 effect I observed in it being .002 volt. Altogether twelve 

 different metals and four alloys were examined and the 

 effect noticed in each of them. In order to raise them to 

 a high temperature without breaking circuit by their 

 fusing I put them through clay tubes (tobacco pipe 

 stems), and when examining metals with low melting 

 points I completely filled up the tube with the metal. A 

 tube of lead when heated gave, after a little irregular 

 heating, .3 volt, and another, with a lead wire passed 

 through it and heated about the middle, gave about half 

 that amount, but in this case there was no irregular or 

 unsymmetrical heating. The effects are not always steady, 

 in fact they very seldom keep steady, but they may be 

 observed with certainty by filling a tube with lead and 

 raising it to a -red heat in a Bunsen flame. The effect 

 may also be observed very easily in fine gold wire, but it 

 does not last so long as that in lead, which shows no sign 

 of ceasing after an hour's or half a day's heating. With 

 gold I observed a higher effect than with any other metal, 

 once observing nearly half a volt. .3 volt was observed 

 with six different metals — lead, copper, gold, tin, zinc and 

 antimony, while, with others, e. g., silver and aluminum, 

 though I could certaiuly observe the effect, it was exceed- 

 ingly small. Sometimes when a metal is heated thus the 

 changes in the electromotive force generated are slow and 

 gradual and at times scarcely perceptible, while at others 

 they are rapid and sometimes apparently instantaneous 

 at a time when the temperature is perfectly steady and 

 nothing is apparent which could cause the changes. An- 

 other curious effect is that sometimes when the temper- 

 ature is falling, after the gas has been turned down or 

 put out, there are rises, generally sudden, in the e. m. f., 

 this was chiefly noticed in lead. These phenomena are 

 generally quite sufficient to mask the ordinary thermo- 

 electric effect at a red heat, and thermoelectric tables are 

 consequently quite unreliable for high temperatures. 



CUREENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY. -NO. XXXIV. 



{Edited by D. G. Brinton, M. B., LL.D., D.Sc.) 



Bastian on Buddhism and the Place of Departed Souls. 

 Eeligions, like all other expressions of human intelli- 

 gence, will ultimately come under a rigid scientific exam- 

 ination at the hands of anthropologists, and the laws of 

 their growth and change will be determined without re- 

 spect to the clamors of their votaries. Of all religions, 

 that which certainly occupies the most territory in the 

 Old W^orld and perhaps has the greatest number of be- 

 lievers is Buddhism. It has recently attracted the atten- 

 tion of several of the ethnologists of Europe, among them 



