WHERE DO SEALS SPEND THE WINTER?
No one knows where the seals go in the winter. In Alaska they begin to appear on the Islands of St. Paul and St. George about the end of April or the first of May, and toward the latter part of August or in the first weeks of September they disappear as strangely and mysteriously as they came. This is one of nature's secrets which she has kept most successfully hid from scientists as well as the prying eyes of the merely curious and inquisitive.
Even in the days, years ago, when the seals numbered five millions or more, apparently some signal unknown to man would be given and the next day the fog-wreathed rocks would be bare, the seals having deserted the islands. With their slipping off into Bering Sea, all trace of them was lost until their return the following spring. Then some morning they would suddenly reappear, disporting themselves in the water or on the shore.
ABOUT SCENTED WOODS.
With the woods of the world to choose from one can easily arrange a whole scale of scents from the sweetest and most delicate of perfumes at one extreme to rank and overpowering odors at the other, says the American Forestry Magazine. The stores of the perfumer's shop will not yield a greater variety than one can find in woods.
The most famous of all scented woods is the incomparable sandalwood. The true sandalwood (Santalum album) is an Oriental tree, the use of which for perfumery and incense began thousands of years ago, and its popularity remains undiminished. The later Greeks considered it one of their greatest luxuries, and no festivities were complete without it. There are many false sandalwoods, at least three from India, one or two from the Philippines and Java, one from Australia and another from the West Indies and Venezuela.
In some parts of the Himalayas and in the Khasia Hills the yew tree is called deodar (God's tree), the name that is elsewhere applied to a true cedar. The wood of the yew is burnt as incense, as is also that of the cypress. One of the favorite woods for incense in the Buddhist temples of India is the juniper. In parts of South America a wood closely related to the lignum-vitae is called palo santo (sacred wood), because of its use for incense in churches.
The Northwestern Indians nearly always made their totem poles out of Western red cedar, but this choice was probably due more to the fact that the wood is easy to work and extremely durable rather than to its fragrance. It may be taken as a very good general rule that woods that are scented are resistant to decay and insect attack and have good cabinet qualities.