3o8 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XII. No. 307 



retreating. In many of these figures a marked prognathism may- 

 be observed. The nose is often large, and does not appear to have 

 ever been flat and wide, as among the Tatars ; hair and beard are 

 frizzy ; the stature, short. In some parts of Babylonia this type 

 seems to have formed the great mass of the population. According 

 to Mr. Bertm's theory, this people was the ' ground race ' of western 

 Asia, and he goes so far as to identify it with the European prehis- 

 toric races, which are by many authors believed to be of Berber 

 origin. He adds, " An important point to notice is that this race 

 is everywhere found in an inferior social position, and it was equally 

 so in the remotest age. Nowhere did it rise to the rank of a dom- 

 inating or ruling race, but everywhere it accepted the yoke of the 

 conquering tribe invading its land. It is the race of the land, and 

 accepts every new master with a passive obedience. This explains 

 why this race has no language of its own, for it accepts willingly 



that of its masters." The author believes that this people was con- 

 quered by Akkadians and by Semites, and that the mixture of 

 these races, with the addition of some Armenian blood, resulted in 

 a population showing the various types found on the monuments. 



The study of the west Asiatic and Egyptian monuments from an 

 anthropological and philological point of view has recently yielded 

 most interesting results, and opened entirely new views of the early 

 history of the ancient world. The intercourse between the various 

 peoples, and their mutual influence upon each other, were so im- 

 portant, that a comprehensive and comparative study of all these 

 numerous peoples is necessary to reach satisfactory results. The 

 theories of Mr. Bertin are suggestive, and well worth a careful con- 

 sideration ; but they must be verified by a comparative study of the 

 monuments of other races, and, what is still more important, by 

 exact anthropometric researches. 



ELECTRICAL NEWS. 

 Submarine Boats. 



There are few books that have been read with so much pleas- 

 ure by young and old as Jules Verne's ' Twenty Thousand Leagues 

 under the Sea.' The submarine boat ' Nautilus,' propelled by 

 electric motors, — very complicated ones, if the writer remembers 

 the picture correctly, — the electricity furnished by powerful bat- 

 teries, was able to move at a wonderful speed beneath the ocean at 

 the will of her mysterious commander. 



The folly of one generation is the wisdom of the next, and to-day 

 we are in all seriousness trying to faintly rival the vessel of Captain 

 Nemo. The boats that are being built are for torpedo purposes, 

 and are neither large, nor do they attain a very high speed, nor 

 can they remain long beneath the water ; but we look for a steady 

 improvement in their performance, and we believe that some day 

 such vessels will be of practical use to mankind. The great diffi- 

 culty in submarine propulsion is the obtaining of some propelling 

 agent that can be used beneath the water. Hand-power was first 

 tried, and later compressed air and carbonic acid have been em- 

 ployed. For automatic torpedoes, such as the Whitehead or Lay, 

 the two latter agents are fairly successful, but the amount of energy 



that can be practically stored by either means is too small to be of 

 use in a real submarine boat. 



The history of the early experiments in submarine navigation is 

 the history of disaster. There are stories of partial successes, but 

 the sequel is usually tragic. A successful submarine boat is said 

 to have been made by a Chicago shoemaker, who was in the habit 

 of going out in it and spending his afternoons in the bottom of the 

 lake. One evening he failed to return, and, as he had not com- 

 municated the plans of his boat to any one, his experience is lost 

 to us. The writer remembers, in the war between Chili and Peru, 

 that a submarine boat was built by the latter government to de- 

 stroy the Chilian fleet, at that time blockading Callao. It was to 

 have been run by compressed air, and was calculated to attain a 

 speed of four miles an hour. An unfortunate miscalculation re- 

 sulted m the weight of the vessel being greater than her displace- 

 ment ; and, on being launched, she immediately went to the bot- 

 tom, where, owing to the characteristics of her builders, she was 

 allowed to remain. During the late war a number of experiments 

 were tried with submarine torpedo-boats ; but, excepting in one 

 case, they resulted in failure. 



There is no inherent impossibility in navigating boats beneath 

 the surface for any length of time. The atmosphere can be puri- 

 fied and its oxygen renewed by chemical means, and the depth that 

 can be attained depends only on the ability of the boat to resist the 

 enormous pressures to which it is subjected at any considerable 

 depth. The distance beneath the surface can be regulated in a 

 number of ways, for the density of the water is practically the same 

 at any depth. The only drawback has been in the difficulty of ob- 

 taining power. In the last few years electricity has promised to 

 remedy this. 



The latest and largest submarine boats are being tried in Tou- 

 lon and at San Fernando respectively. Let us first describe the 

 French boat, the ' Gymnole.' She is driven by an electro-motor 

 coupled directly to the armature shaft, and supplied with electricity 

 from storage-batteries. The motor absorbs 52 electrical horse- 

 power at 280 revolutions a minute. The total weight of the motor 

 is about two tons. The electric energy is furnished by a battery of 

 564 storage-cells of the Commelin-Desmasures-Baillehache type, 

 described in this journal (No. 305). Each of the cells weighs 

 about forty pounds, making over ten tons for the weight of the 

 battery. They have furnished 58 horse-power for four hours. The 

 experiments made on this set of cells show that to store one horse- 

 power of energy requires about eighty pounds, while energy can be 

 taken out from them at the rate of a horse-power for four hundred 

 pounds. The ' Gymnote ' has been tested in the roadstead of 

 Toulon to determine her behavior, but so far the experiments have 

 only shown how long she can safely remain beneath the water. 

 Half an hour is the longest time as yet, but it is hoped that the 

 time of submersion will be considerably increased. What the 

 speed of this vessel will be, how easily she can be controlled, and 

 what depth she can safely reach, are questions yet to be deter- 

 mined. 



The boat being tested at San Fernando, ' Le Peral,' has been 

 constructed from the designs of Lieut. Isaac Peral of the Spanish 

 Navy. It is about seventy-two feet long, by nine feet and a half 

 at its greatest diameter. It is driven by five electro-motors, — two 

 of twenty, three of nine horse-power, — furnished with current from 

 600 cells of storage-battery. No experiments have been made on 

 this boat, but it is calculated that she will have a speed of twelve 

 knots at the surface, and of ten knots when half submerged. It is 

 also calculated that she can remain below the water for two hours 

 without requiring a fresh supply of air. 



Germany is not behindhand in these experiments, and has built 

 at Kiel a boat one hundred and twelve feet long. Its immersion is 

 regulated by two vertical screws driven by a six-horse-power mo- 

 tor. What the propelling power is, and what its performance may 

 be, we have no data that will enable us to guess ; but that the mo- 

 tive power is furnished by electricity there can be little doubt. 



These three boats, the most ambitious yet constructed and the 

 most probable of success, contrast but meanly with the ' Nautilus.' 

 The immense size of the latter, her speed of fifty miles an hour, the 

 depths to which she descended, will be for many years, if not 

 always, the imaginings of a story-writer, with no practical counter- 



