866 General Notes. [August, 
consisting of eighteen atolls, and with an area of only twelve 
Square miles, contain 37,000 inhabitants, while the Marshall group 
with thirty-five square miles, distributed among thirty atolls, has 
only 10,000. Four thousand ethnological specimens, illustrating 
the lives of these islanders and of those of New Britain, have 
been collected by this traveler, also some interesting prehistoric 
remains from Ponapé, one of the Carolines, many skulls anda 
The Marshall islanders are rapidly losing their ancient cus- 
toms, and Herr Finsch believes that the great sea canoe, which 
he has brought away, will soon be the last of those with which 
this people, though without nautical knowledge, won repute as 
mariners and undertook long journeys. European skiffs will 
soon supersede them. 
The people of the Gilbert islands retain more of their original 
manners than those of the Marshall islands. : 
The Maneap or assembly house of Butaritari, one of this 
group, is 250 feet long by 114 wide; dimensions which are 
aco in a structure held together by cords of cocoa-nut 
ers, 
Asta.—The six hundred thousand square miles contained in 
Persia form a plateau roughly averaging from three thousand to 
five thousand feet above the sea, and the entire region, according 
to Col. Champain, is not only very poorly provided with means 
has risen and fallen at irregular intervals since 1780, but was “a 
feet lower in 1830 than in 1780. Lenz made permanent marks al 
Baku in 1830 at the sea level, but the oscillations since that a 
have shown no sensible decrease. On May 30, 1853, the level 
pasture lands. The Tartars of Middle Siberia, once a pose | 
: s ng the poo 
_ Privileged merchants, are decreasing, and are among a miser- 
