284 



SCIENCE, 



[Vol. V., No. 113. 



dren ; and the community was bound to feed them 

 under the name of Kumolan children, who spent three 

 days in the houses of the richer members of the com- 

 munity, two days in those of the moderately wealthy, 

 and one day with the poorest. But of late the custom 

 has arisen of selling children, and especially girls, to 

 Olekminsk merchants, who sell them further to the 

 Yakutes and Tunguses of the Olekminsk district. 

 The parents sell girls for from thirty to forty roubles 

 (from three to four pounds) ; and in Olekmir they are 

 re-sold for sixty roubles, sometimes eighty roubles. 

 Of course, this trade is made under the cover of 

 ' taking children to bring up.' The Irkutsk society 

 having taken interest in this communication, it has 

 received information from Yakutsk authorities, and 

 from a well-known student of Yakute life, Mr. Gorok- 

 hoff. It appears from these communications that 

 such trade really exists; the chief impulse to it being 

 given less by the work a purchased girl might do than 

 by the possibility of receiving for her the kalym, that 

 is, the money paid by men for purchasing a wife. 

 Woman labor is at so low a price that one might have 

 a woman in his household and pay her half a piece 

 of cotton, 'for a shirt,' per year. But the kalym 

 reaches very high prices. One rich Yakute has re- 

 cently sold his daughter to a Tungus for 3,000 rein- 

 deer, and the same price was recently given by a 

 half-idiotic Yakute for the daughter of another 

 Yakute. Middendorff quotes also several instances 

 of a very high kalym paid for girls, its average being 

 about 500 roubles. When a Russian priest sold a girl 

 whom he had educated, for five sables and ten skins, 

 it was considered as a very low price. Altogether, 

 the kalym is the chief cause of maintaining the trade 

 in girls, together with the gradual impoverishment 

 of the Yakutes. 



— The second part of this season's course of 

 Saturday scientific lectures in Washington opened 

 March 28, with the following programme: President 

 J. C. Welling, Oldest history in the light of newest 

 science; Mr. Frederick W. True, Ornithorhynchus, 

 a mammal that lays eggs; Medical Director A. L. 

 Gihon, U.S.N. , Sanitary ignorance among high and 

 low; Mr. J. S. Diller, A trip to Mount Shasta, Cali- 

 fornia; Dr. D. E. Salmon, Our invisible enemies, the 

 plagues of animal life; Prof. T. C. Mendenhall, 

 Weighing the earth. 



— Capt. L. U. Herendeen of San Francisco com- 

 municates the following notes on prehis toric struc- 

 tures in Micronesia. American missionaries recently 

 settled at Ponape, may, it is hoped, furnish additional 

 details hereafter. 



A few years ago I visited Ponape Island in the 

 Pacific, in east longitude 158° 22', and north latitude 

 6° 50 ; . The island is surrounded by a reef, with a 

 broad ship-channel between it and the island. At 

 places in the reef there were natural breaks, that 

 served as entrances to the harbors. In these ship- 

 channels there were a number of islands, many of 

 which were surrounded by a wall of stone five or six 

 feet high; and on these islands there stood a great 

 many low houses, built of the same kind of stone as 

 the walls about them. These structures seem to 



have been used as temples and forts. The singular 

 feature of these islands is that the walls are a foot or 

 more below the water. When they were built, they 

 were evidently above the water, and connected with 

 the mainland; but they have gradually sunk until 

 the sea has risen a foot or more around them. The 

 natives on the island do not know when these works 

 were built : it is so far back in the past, that they 

 have even no tradition of the structures. Yet the 

 works show signs of great skill, and certainly prove 

 that whoever built them knew thoroughly how to 

 transport and lift heavy blocks of stone. Up in the 

 mountains of the island there is a quarry of the same 

 kind of stone that was used in building the wall 

 about the islands; and in that quarry to-day there 

 are great blocks of stone that have been hewn out, 

 ready for transportation. The natives have no tra- 

 dition touching the quarry, — who hewed the stone, 

 when it was done, or why the work ceased. They 

 are in greater ignorance of the great phenomena that 

 are going on about them than the white man who 

 touches on their island for a few hours for water. 

 There is no doubt in my mind that the island was 

 once inhabited by an intelligent race of people, who 

 built the temples and forts of heavy masonry on the 

 high bluffs of the shore of the island, and that, as the 

 land gradually subsided, these bluffs became islands. 

 They stand to-day with a solid wall of stone around 

 them, partly submerged in water. 



— J. Borodin describes, in the journal of the Royal 

 microscopical society, what he believes to be the 

 long-sought pure chlorophyl. He obtains it in a 

 crystalline form, by slow evaporation of an alcoholic 

 solution, though he has not yet been able to isolate 

 the crystals. They are doubly refractive, giving a 

 beautiful green sheen in polarized light. Their 

 physical properties differ from those of the dark- 

 green crystals of hypochlorine hitherto obtained. 



— American zoologists will be interested to learn 

 what is to become of the great collections in Cen- 

 tral-American ornithology and entomology amassed 

 by Messrs. Salvin and Godman. A recent note in 

 Nature announces that a part of it is already given 

 to the British museum, and that the rest is to follow. 

 One collection, presented on certain conditions not 

 specified by Nature, comprises the entire series of 

 American birds brought together by those gentlemen, 

 numbering upwards of twenty thousand specimens, 

 and illustrating, more than any other collection in 

 existence, the life-history and geographical distri- 

 bution of the birds of tropical America. No labor or 

 expense has been spared in the formation of this 

 splendid group of ornithological rarities. The other 

 gift, which is unconditional, comprises a very fine 

 collection of Central-American Coleoptera of the 

 families of Cicindelidae and Carabidae. It contains 

 969 species, and, moreover, 7,678 examples, of which 

 more than four hundred are types of new species 

 described in the work entitled ' Biologia Centrali 

 Americana,' now in course of publication by Messrs. 

 Salvin and Godman. To this collection will be ulti- 

 mately added, by gift, the remaining families of 

 Coleoptera, with other entomological specimens. 



