POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



141 



possible. Other women followed her exam- 

 ple, and the fan was invented. The Chinese 

 historians trace the use of the fan in their 

 country back to a contemporary of Rameses 

 II of Egypt ; and it is mentioned by a writer 

 of a thousand years before the Christian era. 

 In ancient Grecian life, a eunuch, in one of 

 the tragedies of Euripides, relates how he 

 waved a fan, " according to the Phrygian 

 fashion," before the hair, face, and bosom of 

 the fair Helen. Fans were early adopted by 

 Roman matrons, who had two kinds — the 

 flabella of ostrich plumes, and the lobelia of 

 thin woven stuff stretched over a frame. A 

 Roman woman never went out without a slave 

 (Jlabellifera) whose duty it was to fan her. 

 It is not known whether the fan was used in 

 Europe as an article of the feminine toilet be- 

 tween the fall of the Roman Empire and the 

 eleventh century, for it is not mentioned in 

 that relation ; but it was certainly used a 

 great deal in the ceremonies of Roman Cath- 

 olic worship, when the deacons and the aco- 

 lytes waved it over the altar at mass. This 

 usage Pere Bonami assumes to have traced 

 back to the apostles. Fans are represented 

 in manuscripts and on monuments of the 

 twelfth century and inventories of the four- 

 teenth, under different names, but without 

 specification of their use. They seem to have 

 been disused in the church in the thirteenth 

 century, to appear again after the Crusades in 

 the warmer countries — Spain and Italy — as 

 an accessory to woman's dress ; but were not 

 seen in France till the sixteenth century, when 

 they were introduced at court by the Italian 

 perfumers who came in the suite of Catherine 

 de Medicis. 



American and African Deserts. — The 



most striking contrast between the North 

 American " deserts " and those of North 

 Africa is described by Prof. Johannes Wal- 

 ther, of Berlin, as consisting in the far 

 greater wealth of vegetation which charac- 

 terizes the former. In every direction the 

 eye is met by the yellow-blossoming ha- 

 lophytae, silver-gray artemisise, and prickly 

 cacti ; between the opuntias are found cush- 

 ions of moss, and at the foot of the hills 

 juniper trees seven feet high with trunks a 

 foot thick. Such are the features of the 

 landscape of the deserts of Utah, where 

 plant-growth has completely disappeared 



only in those places in which the saline 

 complexion of the soil kills vegetation. The 

 Van Horn deserts in western Texas, and the 

 Gila deserts in California are equally rich 

 in vegetation ; the altitude of these deserts 

 above the sea-level makes no important 

 difference. Either the mean rainfall in the 

 American deserts is greater than in those of 

 Africa, or else the flora of the American 

 deserts is better adapted to a dry atmos- 

 phere. Although the deserts of the two 

 continents present fundamental differences 

 as regards vegetation, there is a surprising 

 similarity between them as regards certain 

 important and characteristic desert phe- 

 nomena, especially with respect to the to- 

 pography of the country. There is the 

 prevalence of plains, with mountains rising 

 from them like islands, with no intervening 

 heaps of debris passing from the plains to 

 the steep mountain slopes. This phenome- 

 non is the more striking, as there are no 

 rubbish deltas, even at the outlet of valleys 

 a thousand feet deep. Another feature com- 

 mon to both is the large number of isolated 

 " island " mountains and of amphitheatre 

 formations in the valleys ; also the intensive 

 effect of insolation, which splits the rocks 

 and flints, and disintegrates the granite into 

 rubbish. The denuding influence of the 

 wind is visible not only in the characteristics 

 of the surface forms just mentioned, which 

 differ in important points from erosion 

 forms, but it can be directly observed in the 

 mighty dust-storms which rush through the 

 desert. In view of such agreement of im- 

 portant and incidental geological phenomena 

 in regions so remote from each other, the 

 phenomenon of desert formation must be 

 considered to be a telluric process which 

 runs its course according to law, just as the 

 glacial phenomena of the polar zone or cu- 

 mulative disintegration in the tropics. 



Wind Effects. — In a paper on The Wind 

 as a Factor in Geology, published in the 

 Engineer's Magazine, Mr. George P. Merrill, 

 after mentioning several familiar examples 

 of the formation of dunes in Europe, passes 

 to the account of similar phenomena in the 

 United States. In May, 1889, a dust-storm 

 occurred in Dakota during which the soil 

 was torn up to a depth of four or five inches 

 and scattered in all directions ; while drifts 



