842 The American Naturalist. [September, 
pling by Chinese, who in 1889 numbered 40,000, while there were 
but 1500 natives and 500 Malays. The tin-bearing layer lies at the 
base of an unctious clay of varying thickness, which is itself below 
alluvial deposits of varying depth. 
Petermann’ s (Part III., 1890) gives a map of the course pursued by 
A. Jakobsen from Flores to Kalao, Tana, Diampia, Pulo Salayer, and 
other small islands north of Flores. The same traveller proceeded 
westward to Adenare Islands. 
B. Moritz contributes to the Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde 
a paper upon the new Turkish province of Hedjaz, and the route from 
Mecca to Medina. The population of Hedjaz has been estimated at 
700,000, but our author deems these figures too high. The nomad 
Bedouins are not more than 27,000 strong. Mecca has 110,000 inhab- 
itants, Medina 40,000, Jeddah 20,000, and all the remaining towns are 
small. The area of the province is 1,193,517 square kilometres. 
In 1888 the population of Hindustan, including Birma, was 269,- 
477,728, or a mean density of 185 per square mile. In Bengal there 
are 443 persons on every square mile, in the Northwest Provinces 416, 
and in the central tributary states 215. Birma is the most sparsely 
peopled, and next to this the vassal states of Bengal, and the districts 
of the extreme northwest. 
There are twenty thousand so-called ** Mountain Jews’’ in the Cau- 
cascus. They have singular beliefs and superstitions, showing Persian 
influences, but for centuries they have had no communication with the 
rest of their race. 
Thanks to the facilities now afforded by the Japanese government 
for the colonization of Hekkaido (Yesso), there was in 1888 more than 
seventy-seven times as much cultivated land as in 1876. The latest 
populations (1887) of the chief cities of Japan are as follows: T okio, 
1,165,048; Osaka, 432,005; Kioto, 264,559; Nagoya, 149,756; 
Yokohama, 115,612; Kobe, 103,969. The total area of the islands is 
382,421 square kilometres, and the population 39,069,007, of whom 
19,731,354 are men. There are 76,624 Christians, and 543 foreign 
missionaries. à; 
Lieutenant Roborowsky sends from the oasis of Nice a continuation 
of his account of the doings of the Russian expedition under Colonel 
Pievtsoff. Accounts of Central Asian journeys are, as a rule, monoto- 
nous, but this is enlivened with a legend of a Mohammedan feminine 
saint, who, being pursued by heathen, prayed to God, and was answered 
