November ii, 1887.] 



SCIENCE. 



231 



■commerce from its port, nor are all the charges contained in the 

 report to be met by the statement that the governor of the State of 

 New York is responsible, by reason of having vetoed appropriations. 

 The report is a serious reflection upon public officials in whom the 

 public and sanitarians have placed implicit reliance, and should be 

 met in the same official way that it has been issued. Unless it is 

 so met, the quarantine authorities must not expect public confidence ; 

 and, whether they do or not, we fear they will not receive it. We 

 shall be only too glad to open the columns of Science to them, and 

 present their statements as fully as we have those of the committee 

 of Philadelphia physicians' 



American Association for the Advancement of Phys- 

 ical Education. — The American Association for the Advance- 

 ment of Physical Education will hold its third annual meeting at 

 the Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, on Nov. 25. The following pro- 

 gramme has been announced : paper by the retiring president. 

 Prof. Edward Hitchcock, A.M.,M.D., Amherst College; 'Physi- 

 cal Training in Elementary Schools in the United States ' (ex- 

 tract from report of New Hampshire Board of Health for 1887), 

 E. H. Fallows, Adelphi Academy ; motion by C. G. Rathman, 

 N. A. T. B., relative to physical training in elementary schools in the 

 United States ; discussion ; report of work done by the N. A. T. B. 

 the past year, H. M. Starkloff, M.D., president N. A. T. B ; ' Phys- 

 ical Measurements, their Use to the Individual,' Edward Hitch- 

 cock, jun., M.D., Cornell University ; discussion opened by W. L. 

 Savage, A.M.,M.D., director Berkely Lyceum, New York City ; gen- 

 eral discussion ; ' Military Training as an Exercise,' J. W. Seaver, 

 M.D., Yale University ; discussion opened by Gen. E. L. Moli- 

 neux, Brooklyn, N.Y., and John White, Ph.D., head master Berkely 

 School, New York City. 



Removal of Needles from the Body. — Dr. Littlewood 

 ■describes in the Lancet a method which he has used successfully 

 in seven cases for the removal of needles from the body. The 

 part supposed to contain the needle is thoroughly rubbed over with 

 an electro-magnet, so as to magnetize the metal, if present. A 

 delicately balanced magnetic needle is held over the part. If the 

 needle is present, its position can be ascertained by the attraction 

 ■or repulsion of the poles of the magnetic needle. Having ascer- 

 tained the presence of the needle, and rendered the part bloodless 

 and painless, an incision is made over the needle ; the electro- 

 magnet is then inserted in the wound, and the needle felt for and 

 •withdrawn. If the needle is firmly embedded, the positive pole of 

 a galvanic battery is placed on the surface of the body of the 

 patient, and the negative pole in contact with the needle, which be- 

 ■comes loosened by electrolysis, and can then be easily removed by 

 the electro-magnet. 



ETHNOLOGY. 



Were the Toltecs an Historic Nationality ? 



Dr. Brinton has for a long time maintained that the Toltecs 

 ■were no historic nationality, but an entirely legendary people. In 

 3. lecture delivered before the American Philosophical Society on 

 Sept. 2, he takes up the question, and ably defends his standpoint 

 which he first expressed in 1868 in his ' Myths of the New World.' 

 The present paper was written to criticise the statements of Char- 

 nay and others who maintain the historical character of this people. 

 The enthusiastic Frenchman Desiree Charnay considers the Toltec 

 civilization the basis of all Central American culture, and traces 

 their migrations from the northern boundary of Mexico to Copan ; 

 but the reasons which he brings forth to support his theory, and 

 which are entirely founded on the character of Central American 

 arts, are not at all conclusive. The Mexican and Central American 

 styles are not sufficiently studied to draw any conclusions as to 

 what is original in each tribe, and what is borrowed from the other ; 

 and Charnay's assertion of a connection between East Asian and 

 Central American arts warns us from accepting his arguments 

 without a thorough criticism. Brinton's opinion is that the emi- 

 gration of the Toltecs from the north, the foundation of Tula in 

 the sixth century, and the dispersion of the Toltecs all over Central 

 America, are entirely fabulous. He compares the facts known 



about Tula and the legends as told by the best authorities, and 

 finds that Tula was nothing else than one of the stations the Aztecs 

 occupied in their migrations. To explain the wide celebrity of the 

 place, which extended to Guatemala and Yucatan, Brinton recurs 

 to its etymology. As the meaning of the name, which is not of 

 rare occurrence in Mexico, he gives ' the place of the sun,' and this, 

 he thinks, brought it into connection with many a myth of light and 

 of solar divinities. This process is one often occurring in the de- 

 velopment of folk-lore. There can be no doubt that Brinton's 

 opinion, that no immediate truth underlies the myth which makes 

 Tula the birthplace and abode of gods, and its inhabitants the civ- 

 ilizers of Central America, is correct. 



Anthropology in the American and British Associa- 

 tions for THE Advancement OF Science. — It is of interest 

 to compare the papers read in the Section of Anthropology of these 

 two associations. While the section of the British Association de- 

 voted much of its time to considering theoretical questions, such as 

 the probable existence of an Archaian white race, the origin of 

 totemism, etc., such questions were hardly touched upon at the 

 meeting of the American Association, which devoted most of its 

 time to listening to the reports of results obtained by explorers in 

 the ethnological and archeeological field. This may in part be due 

 to the fact that the field of researches in America is so vast. The 

 amount of unknown material is so large, that every year brings 

 some new and unexpected discoveries. But there is another char- 

 acteristic feature of the American Association. What little discus- 

 sion of theories there was, referred principally to the discussion of 

 classifications, — a subject which seems to have been entirely 

 wanting among the papers of the British Association. If we con- 

 sider that classifications are only a help, not an aim, of science, and 

 that the great goal of ethnology and anthropology is to outline the 

 early history of mankind and to work out the psychology of nations, 

 we must concede that the work of the British Association is su- 

 perior to ours. We do not mean to say that there are no vague 

 theories held by British scientists, or that no eminent work is done 

 by Americans ; but the favorite studies of ethnologists as a whole, 

 and as expressed in the subjects of papers presented to the English 

 Association, seem to be of a more general and of a higher scien- 

 tific character than they are here. We mention a few of the papers 

 read at the Manchester meeting of the British Association accord- 

 ing to the reports published in Nature. Mr. I. Taylor discussed 

 the probable origin of the Aryans. He dwelled on the recent lin- 

 guistic researches, which show that the primitive Aryans must have 

 inhabited a forest-clad country in the neighborhood of the sea, cov- 

 ered during a prolonged winter with snow ; the vegetation consist- 

 ing largely of the fir, the beech, the oak, and similar trees, while 

 the fauna comprised the bear, the fox, the hare, the deer, and the 

 salmon. These conditions restrict it to a region north of the Alps 

 and west of the Black Sea. The author attempted to show, both 

 from the anthropological and the linguistic point of view, that the 

 Aryans have evolved from a Finnic people. J. S.Stuart maintained 

 the existence of an Archaian white stock, from which he is inclined 

 to derive so widely different phenomena as the American and 

 Chinese civilizations, as well as the origin of Hittites, Iberians, and 

 Picts. C. Staniland Wake treated the problem of totemism from 

 the point of view that the totem is the re-incarnated form of the 

 legendary ancestor of the gens or family group aUied to the totem, 

 — a view which is undoubtedly correct in many cases. S. J. Hick- 

 son gave a few remarks on certain degenerations of design in 

 Papuan art. It would have been more proper to speak about con- 

 ventionalism in Papuan art, — a field that offers many interesting 

 problems, and to which Dr. O. Uhle of Dresden recently made a 

 valuable contribution in the publications of the Ethnological 

 Museum of Dresden. Miss A. W. Buckland spoke about the cus- 

 tom of tattooing, which, although almost universally practised, 

 varies so much in the mode of performing the operation ; the 

 various methods seeming to have such definite limits as to make 

 them anthropologically valuable as showing either racial connec- 

 tion or some intercourse formerly existing between races long iso- 

 lated. This paper belongs to a class of inquiries which have of late 

 been carried on by a number of ethnologists, and which yield valu- 

 able results. We call to mind Prof. E. S. Morse's researches on the 



