~ 

1891.] Editorial. 991 
The fact is that the Republican party has made itself odious 
all over the land by the extreme to which it has carried the idea 
of protection, and the pettiness of its tariff legislation. (Among 
the objects recently detained or sold undêr our tariff laws may be 
mentioned imported snakes, monkeys and postage stamps.)- It is 
a party that has been of great service to the country, but it is 
estranging more and more the most intelligent class of our 
citizens. The Democratic party will havea trial in our next 
Congress, and we will see whether it will do better or not. It is 
probable that the intellectual interests of the country will have to 
fight for existence for many years to come, or until it is better 
represented in the councils of the nation. \ 
—WE are glad to see that Major Powell, director of the United 
States Geological Survey, kas withdrawn his proposed scale of 
colors for his geological maps, in favor of a more reasonable 
system. The scheme presented by him to the international 
congress at Washington was more in accordance with that in 
general use, and though it did not escape some criticism, it passed 
the ordeal fairly well. It is cause of just congratulation that the - 
country has been spared an expense of many hundreds of 
thousands of dollars for geological maps, which would have gone 
far towards making us ridiculous in the eyes of geologists and 
their friends. The protest of the NATURALIST has wrought such 
a saving to the government that we feel that we are entitled to 
some special consideration at its hands; say a subscription which 
will place a copy on the table of each member of the Senate and 
House of Representatives in perpetuum. 
—CONSIDERABLE progress has been recently made in the dis- 
covery of the phylogeny of man, two steps of which are 
noticed in the present number of the NATURALIST. In the first 
place, the men of Spy (Belgium) described by MM. Lohest and 
Fraipont, of Liége, constitute a well-marked ancestral type 
within the genus Homo. The Neanderthal skull, represented by 
a calvarium only, was for a long time without corroborative 
~ Support as the representative of a race of man, and it was hence 
_ supposed by some persons to have belonged to an idiot or a 
cy 


