SCIENCE. 



[Vol. X. No. 230 



Women. 



A LATE correspondent of yours is guilty of a species of bad 

 taste, which happily is rapidly becoming extinct. It was once con- 

 sidered both clever and gentlemanly to speak of women as if they 

 belonged to one of the lower orders of animals, but that period has 

 now quite passed by. Remarks of such a kind are hardly ever 

 met with in English publications, and seldom in those of this coun- 

 tr)f within a certain range of longitude. I happened to see it 

 stated lately in a book on etiquette that it was no longer considered 

 good form to make insulting remarks about women, and, when a 

 principle has reached that organ of distribution, it may be con- 

 sidered that it has already becomepretty widely disseminated. The 

 change is an agreeable one, not only to women, but also to the 

 rather numerous class of chivalrous-minded men. 



If women are not capable of a very high degree of intelligence, 

 it can at least be maintained that they are capable of a higher de- 

 gree than Americans. An English woman has written greater 

 novels, and a Russian woman has made more important contribu- 

 tions to pure mathematics, than any American man. Neither 

 women nor Americans have had very great incentives to intellectual 

 work hitherto, but it is quite possible to hope that they will both 

 play a more important role in the future than they have done in 

 the past. 



If women are more easily frightened than men, it is as easy to 

 attribute it to a more sensitive organization as to any other cause. 

 Poets and musicians are not as cool and collected in the presence 

 of danger as firemen, nor white men as the American Indians. 

 Many people consider that the delicately balanced nervous organi- 

 zation of the horse indicates as high a degree of development as is 

 to be found in more phlegmatic and thick-skinned varieties of 

 animals. 



It is not surprising to find that your correspondent's bad taste is 

 equalled by his bad logic. It is seldom that one finds in so short 

 a space so many pretty specimens of unreason : — 



1. The cockroach, when caught between two hot portions of 

 metal, chose to jump down instead of walking over them. If it 

 had broken its neck, and if the metal had not been so hot as to 

 injure it, this conduct would have turned out to be very foolish ; 

 but, in fact, the cockroach ran away unhurt. The highest wisdom 

 could not have dictated a more prudent course of conduct, and 

 there is hence no analogy to a case of jumping from a window irj 

 unreasoned terror when there are other and better modes of 

 escape. 



2. Because an organized being has reached a stage of develop- 

 ment where reasonable conduct may be looked for, it does not follow 

 that none of its actions will be instinctive. Both men and women 

 perform many instinctive actions, — a drowning man will instinc- 

 tively catch at straws, — but that does not prove that they are 

 not endowed with reason in addition to instinct. 



3. Your correspondent maintains that what would be instinct in 

 women, and hence proof of a low grade of intelligence, is, in the 

 cockroach, " singularly like the operation of reason." But it is no 

 mark of reason having come into play, that conduct looks intelli- 

 gent to the outsider. If it were, we should have to attribute 

 reason to the Amoeba, which encloses food and not grains of sand, 

 and to the Drosera, which shuts up on bits of meat and not on 

 bits of chalk. The one sure objective test of the action of reason 

 is that different individuals behave differently under the same cir- 

 cumstances, and that test is wanting here. We are expressly told 

 that every one of more than a dozen cockroaches did exactly the 

 same thing. Cockroaches make their constant home by the kitchen 

 range, and there is hardly any source of danger which ancestral 

 experience is more likely to have warned them of than hot metal. 



L. 



Ancient Scrapers. 



A FACT has lately come to my knowledge which may be of in- 

 terest to archaeological students of the ancient stone age, who have 

 frequently expressed surprise that so few of the ancient scrapers, 

 blades, chipped axes, and other cutting implements, show signs of 

 use. 



Lieutenant Stoney, Lieutenant Ray, Nelson, Turner, and others 



have sent to the National Museum a large number of modern 

 Eskimo scrapers, and also many specimens of the implements used 

 in chipping and sharpening their scrapers. The latter are of two 

 kinds: I. A curved handle of walrus ivory, with short pieces of 

 antler lashed in a groove cut in the front of the handle (this form 

 has frequently been figured) ; 2. A single cylindrical handle of wood, 

 into one end of which an incisor tooth of a beaver has been firmly 

 fixed. Indeed, one or two specimens consist of a portion of the 

 upper jaw with the teeth in place. This tool is called by all col- 

 lectors a knife-sharpener. Lieutenant Stoney informs me that 

 during his late exploration in Kotzchue Sound he saw the natives 

 using these implements, and says that they keep them always at 

 hand, and spend much time in touching up the edges of these 

 scrapers and other stone cutting-tools, and that the beaver-tooth 

 sharpener is also employed by the ivory-carvers to keep a fresh 

 edge on their metal knives. The variation in the length of scraper- 

 blades is due partly to the fact that some of them, when new, are 

 over two inches long, and become worn down by constant sharpen- 

 ing until they are reduced to a mere stub. It will be seen from 

 Lieutenant Stoney 's observation that it will be difficult to find in 

 Alaska a scraper-blade showing signs of use, the interest of the 

 artisan depending upon his keeping his edge constantly sharp. 



O. T. Mason. 



Washington. June 25. 



Volapuk. 



I COPY the titlepage of one and a part of another grammar of 

 Volapuk, before me. Hachette & Co. is a London house, as you 

 will see. The Paris house is Le Soudier. " Grammar of Volapuk : 

 The Language of the World. For all Speakers of the English 

 Language. Translated and published with the consent of the in- 

 ventor, Johann Martin Schleyer, by W. A. Seret. Glasgow, Thomas 

 Murray & Sons ; London, Whittaker & Co." " International Com- 

 mercial Language. Abridged Grammar. ... By Karl Dornbusch. 

 London, Hachette & Co. ; Paris, H. Le Soudier." 



E. A. HORSFORD. 

 Cambridge, June 25. 



Pineal Eye of Lizard. 



The pineal eye is so well developed in the common pine-tree 

 lizard (Sceleportcs tmdtdatus) that it may probably seem to warn 

 its owner of the advent of daylight. It is a lenticular, glassy area 

 of the skin of the vertex (about a millimetre in sagittal diameter), 

 surrounded by a yellow border, and having a dark spot in its centre. 

 The dark spot is opaque, caused by a mass of pigment internal to 

 the dermis, set on the extremity of a pineal outgrowth from the 

 brain. The clear area around it is caused by the dermis, which is 

 transparent and free from the pigment which covers it internally 

 in other parts. The eye is covered by an escutcheon-shaped epi- 

 dermal shield, more transparent in the centre and larger (3x3 mil- 

 limetres) than the normal epidermal scales. The only sign of de- 

 generacy is the central cloudy mass of pigment, like a big cataract. 



G. Macloskie. 



Princeton, June 25. 



The Charleston Earthquake. 



I FEEL thankful to Professor Mendenhall for his forcible criticism 

 of the paper relating to the Charleston earthquake, and fully concur 

 with him in his remarks concerning the uncertainty of the data up- 

 on which the insoseismals were drawn. This was commented up- 

 on in similar vein in the paper under discussion. He cannot com- 

 plain of them more loudly than we did. The features to which he 

 calls attention (viz., that the curves of high intensity are less sinu- 

 ous than those of low intensity) had not escaped our attention, and 

 the results of our reflections were these : ist, The data indicated 

 that the amount of variation of intensity within any zone or annu- 

 lus generally bears a smaller ratio to the mean intensity of that 

 zone when the mean intensity is high than when it is low (I think 

 this was to be expected, and is intelligible from the nature of the 

 case), hence there ought to be less sinuosity in the inner than in 

 the outer curves ; 2d, In order that the amount of sinuosity may be 

 in due proportion in all curves, the density of observation (i.e., 

 number of observations per unit area) should be inversely pro- 



