6 
THE NATURALIST AND COLLECTOR 
Some of the palms are giants, even 
their leaves being enormous. A leaf 
of the raphia, a Brazilian palm, is sev¬ 
enty feet long and fort\ T in diameter. 
Another genus, “ Maximiliana regia,” 
has leaves fity feet long, while a sin¬ 
gle leaf of the talipat palm of Ceylon is 
used as a tent, sometimes covering fif¬ 
teen people. 
But of all the leaves that strike us as 
remarkable, that of the Victor La regia is 
the most phenomenal. On New year, 
1873, Sir Robert Sellomburg was sail¬ 
ing up the Berbice riyer when he dis¬ 
covered the famous lily with leaves 
six and a half feet across, with a rim 
five inches high, bright green above 
and crimson beneath. Large.birds a e 
often standing upon them, and one 
grown in a hothouse served as a raft 
for a child. 
The seaweed includes some remark¬ 
able forms. On the south shore of 
Santa Catalina island the great beds 
of kelp form in certain places a pro¬ 
tection, and a small steamer in which 
the writer made trips sometimes an¬ 
chored by hauling aboard one of the 
enormous leaves The Macrocystis py- 
rifera grows in Antarctic waters to a 
length of 200 feet, and at Kerguelen's 
Land it has been found growing up¬ 
ward to a length of 700 feet, and strong 
enough to hold a good-sized vessel—a 
veritable giant of the ocean. 
— Chas. Fredrick Holder. 
Considering the various methods of. 
classifying human variations. Prof. 
Giuseppi Sergi finds that external char¬ 
acteristics cannot be relied upon, that 
the skeleton presents greater stability, 
and that the characteristics of the 
cranium are the most important and 
useful. From this he traces 16 var¬ 
ieties and 51 subvarieties in the human 
species, and believes that he has not 
exhausted the number. 
A Country Rich in Fossils. 
The Bad Lands are a strange com¬ 
bination of desolation, horror and in¬ 
comprehensible freaks of the primeval 
world. There are lofty peaks, bare 
and brown—baked into spires of burn¬ 
ing rock by the hot sun of a blinding 
alkali that has made all that country a 
desert worse than Sahara ever was said 
to be. 
The rivers run white or turbid with 
this alkaline concretion in winter and 
are dry and dusty channels in the sum¬ 
mer. Ths peaks, the.valleys and every 
feature of the vvhole region, in fact, 
seems to be thrown down upon the 
earth in nature’s angriest mood—a 
hideous conglomeration, in which even 
the geological strata are displaced and 
entangled. This strange region was 
once the salt-washed bottom of a sea, 
and the traces of the receding waves 
are visible on every hand. The fossils, 
which are now our main pursuit, are 
mostly aquatic animals. Few birds, 
and those mostly of the semi-reptilian 
character, are found among them, 
while innumerable bones of gigantic 
saurians dot the shale and sandstone 
of the valleys. Mingled with them are 
remains of bear, antelope and buffalo 
and relics of an intermediate age, the 
bones of the mastodons and elephants 
—not mammoths—and of a three-toed 
equine, one of the ancestors of the 
horse. Some of the saurians of the 
eocene and miocene periods were in¬ 
describably hideous. Looking upon the 
remains of these monsters and gazing 
on the awful scenery of the country—a 
bit of hades upturned to view, one 
might say—is it any wonder the In¬ 
dians shunned the Bad Land and said 
they were haunts of ghosts and the 
home of evil demons? 
— H. Garrett. 
