The St. Kildans.—St. Kilda, the farthest out to sea of all the British Isles, is a rounded mountain with "stack rocks" and islets round it, rises twelve hundred and twenty feet in height, and contains a settlement of about seventy-five men, women, and children—almost the only representatives left on the British Islands of man in the hunting age. On one of the subsidiary islands, Boreray, is gathered the main body of the sea birds for which the island is famous; and on a third, Soa, are the diminutive descendants of Viking sheep, left by old sea rovers. Mr. R. Kearton, who has recently visited the islands for recreation among the sea birds, represents that in the little community of its people the ordinary and extraordinary operations of life seem inverted. Sport is a serious work; sheep herding and shearing are an exciting sport. A St. Kildan qualifies for marriage by proving his courage and skill as a fowler, by standing on a dizzy precipice called Lover's Stone, and goes out bird snaring with a serious face. When he wants a sheep for the butcher, he asks his friends to a sheep hunt in the island of Soa, in which dogs and men pursue the animals from rock to rock. An offer made by a factor to supply the people with nets, so that they might catch the sheep with more humanity and less waste of life, was rejected by them. They preferred the old methods, which supplied plenty of danger and excitement. While the sheep are hunted, the cows are thoroughly spoiled. Every day the women are seen hard at work picking dock leaves and storing them in baskets for the cows at milking time, for they will not be milked unless they are fed. The sheep on Soa Island are plucked instead of being sheared, at the time when the wool would naturally be shed, and what wool will not come off in this way is cut off with a pocket knife. When the steamer with Mr. Kearton reached the island, no one came down to meet it till the whistle had been blown two or three times. "It was not etiquette to rush down like a parcel of savages," but the people "retire to tidy themselves, and then row out and call in proper form."
The Island of Sakhalin.—Mr. Benjamin Howard, an English visitor at the recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, presented before Section E of that body an interesting account of the great but little-known island of Sakhalin, more generally spelled Saghalien in our geographies. Mr. Howard, however, strongly urged the former spelling, as most correctly representing the name, which is always pronounced by the Russians in three syllables, with the accent on the first. It is now used as a penal colony by the Russian Government, and a more hopelessly remote and inaccessible spot for such a purpose can hardly be found. To it are sent the hardest cases among the Siberian prisoners; and Mr. Howard spoke of becoming accustomed, during his stay there, to meeting scarcely any human beings but murderers, except, of course, the guards and officials. The island is extremely inaccessible; there is no commerce, and neither inducement nor opportunity for vessels to touch there, while much of the coast is ice-bound for a large part of the year. Mr. Howard, who was engaged in some scientific work on the island in the service of the Government, is one of the very few foreigners who have traveled or resided there at all. He predicts for Sakhalin, however, a future of considerable importance ultimately, though only after a long period of preliminary development and exploitation as a penal colony, which stage has but lately been begun. It has forest and mining resources—among the latter, coal; the deposits are near the surface, but thus far have been very little examined. He was unable to give any data as to their geological age or actual extent; but the Government will no doubt soon make investigations. The most remarkable possibilities, however, are in the line of fisheries, the coasts swarming with fish to an extent that is scarcely credible by one who has not seen them. Mr. Howard said jocosely that he would hardly dare to relate what he had personally witnessed, in view of the usual reputation of "fish stories." The climate is of course rigorous, under the influence of cold northern currents, and markedly in contrast with that of the same latitude on the American side of the Pacific, where the Japan current carries its modifying influence as the Gulf Stream does to northern Europe. Some agriculture, however, is possible during the short summer, and the penal colonists have made fair beginnings of self-support. He referred further to a remnant of native Aino population as very interesting from the fact that they have preserved their peculiarities of life and manners, and their purity of stock, much more completely through their isolation than the Ainos of the Japanese Islands, who have been modified more or less by association with the latter people.
Technical and Popular Names.—In a paper criticising the multiplication of local names in geology, Prof. C. E. Keyes distinguishes between names devised with a conscientious desire to better the condition of a science by clothing the new ideas with simple words and those which are the product of a name-making mania. "The first can not be too highly commended, nor the second too deeply deplored." Every progressive science must discard the names that have served their purpose, and must be prepared to receive all of the new ones demanded. The sciences have each two phases, for each of which a terminology is demanded, in one of which the names must be technical and special, established primarily for the investigator, and in the other general, popular, simple, and free from technical appearance; but the distinction is rarely made. Those who object to the prevalence of technical names in other sciences seldom reflect that they have them in their own art. Yet if a man of science should desire to familiarize himself with the artisan's work, "he would be, after five minutes' talk with a machinist or electrician, confronted by so many unfamiliar terms—technical terms of everyday use—that he would at once cry out for greater simplicity of language." In the geological sciences the technicalities play the same part they do in the arts and in business. Every new name in geology, however, must be properly defined before it can be noticed, and its subsequent career will depend on its utility. It may be said that no greater boon to the working geologist has been devised than the plan of designating geographically geological units irrespective of exact position or age. Since its adoption a vast mass of valuable information has been obtained that was previously unthought of, and is in a shape to be always used; the other departments of geology have been much aided, and stratigraphical geology has been greatly helped.
The Origin of a Curious Habit.—The following paragraphs are taken from a recent Nature. It is well known that the kea, or mountain parrot of New Zealand, has acquired the habit of attacking sheep, and making holes by means of its sharp and powerful beak in the backs of these animals for the purpose of abstracting the kidney fat, which appears to be esteemed as a luxurious diet. It is supposed that this peculiar habit or instinct was developed by the bird getting the fat from the skins of sheep that had been slaughtered, but this solution is not very satisfactory, as there appears nothing to connect the fat on the skins of sheep with the live animals. In a note published in the Zoölogist (May 16th), Mr. F. R. Godfrey, writing from Melbourne, offers the following solution of the mystery, which seemed to him to be simple and satisfactory, and more rational than the sheepskin theory: In the hilly districts of the middle island of New Zealand there is a great abundance of a white moss, or lichen, which exactly resembles a lump of white wool, at the roots of which are found small white fatty substances, supposed by some to be the seeds of the plant, and by others to be a grub or maggot which infests it, which is the favorite food of the kea. Probably the bird, misled by this resemblance, commenced an exploration in sheep, and this proving satisfactory, originated the new habit. In a note to this suggestion the editor points out that Mr. Godfrey is in agreement with another observer—Mr. F. R. Chapman—who in describing the hills of this island says: "A very interesting raoulia, or vegetable sheep, was very plentiful on steep, rocky places.... It is said that the keas tear them up with their powerful beaks, and that these birds learned to eat mutton through mistaking dead sheep for masses of raoulia."
Changes in Plant Characters.—From experiments upon the cultural evolution of Cyclamen latifolium, W. T. Thiselton Dyer finds that, when once specific stability has been broken down in a plant, morphological changes of great variety and magnitude can be brought about in a comparatively short space of time. It appears that though sudden variations do occur, they are, as far as we know, slight as long as self-fertilization is adhered to. The striking results obtained by cultivators have been due to the patient accumulation by selection of gradual but continuous variation in any desired direction. The size which any variable organ can reach does not appear to be governed by any principle of correlation. Large flowers are not necessarily accompanied by large leaves. The general tendency of a plant varying freely under artificial conditions seems to be atavistic—or to shed adaptive modifications which have ceased to be useful, and to revert to a more generalized type, or to reproduce characters which are already present in other members of the same group. But this statement must be accepted with caution. The most remarkable phenomenon in the cultivation of the Cyclamen is the development of a plume or crest on the inner surface of each corolla segment. This shows that the plant still possesses the power to strike out a new line and to develop characters which would even be regarded as having specific value.
Hanging an Elephant.—One of the elephants in Barnum and Bailey's show, having repeatedly shown signs of insubordination and bad temper, it was finally decided to kill him. From a note in Nature we get the following account of his execution: After considerable discussion it was decided to strangle him. A new Manila rope was loosely wound three times around his neck, and his legs, fully stridden, were securely chained each to a post firmly driven into the ground alongside each limb. The animal was intentionally not isolated from his fellows, as it was feared that if placed by itself it would become restive and ill-tempered. The rope surrounding the beast's neck had one end secured to three strong pillars in the ground, some distance away and slightly in advance of the fore feet; and the other, which terminated in a loop, was hooked to a double series of pulleys, to the tackle of which ninety men were attached. When all was ready, the slack was gently, quietly, and without any apparent annoyance to the elephant—which kept on eating hay—taken in till the coils round its neck were just taut. The word was then given, "Walk away with the rope." Amid perfect silence the ninety men walked away, without apparently any effort. So noiselessly and easily did everything work that, unless with foreknowledge of what was going to take place, one might have been present without realizing what the march of these men meant. The elephant gave no sign of discomfort either by trunk or tail. Its fellows standing close by looked on in pachydermatous unconcern, and at the end of exactly thirty seconds it slowly collapsed and lay down as if of its own accord. There was absolutely no struggle and no motion, violent or otherwise, in any part of the body, nor the slightest indication of pain. In a few seconds more there was no response obtained by touching the eyeball. At the end of thirteen minutes after the order to "walk away" the eye had become rigid and dim. That no more humane, painless, and rapid method of taking the life of a large animal could be devised was the opinion of all the experts who witnessed the execution.
MINOR PARAGRAPHS.
Count Gleichen relates, in his story of the mission to Menelek, that besides the Maria Theresa 1780 dollars, the people of Abyssinia, for small change, use a bar of hard crystallized salt, about ten inches long and two inches and a half broad and thick, slightly tapered toward the end, five of which go to the dollar at the capital. People are very particular about the standard of fineness of the currency. "If it does not ring like metal when flicked with the finger nail, or if it is cracked or chipped, they won't take it. It is a token of affection also, when friends meet, to give each other a lick of their respective amolis, and in this way the material value of the bar is also decreased. For still smaller change cartridges are used, of which three go to one salt. It does not matter what sort they are. Some sharpers use their cartridges in the ordinary way, and then put in some dust and a dummy bullet to make up the difference, or else they take out the powder and put the bullet in again, so that possibly in the next action the unhappy seller will find that he has only miss-fires in his belt; but this is such a common fraud that no one takes any notice of it, and a bad cartridge seems to serve as readily as a good one."
A study of problems in the Psychology of Reading, by J. O. Quantz, bore upon the questions of the factors which make a rapid reader, the relations of rapidity to mental capacity and alertness, quickness of visual perception, and amount of practice; and whether those who gain their knowledge principally through the eye or through the ear obtain and retain most from reading. The author finds that colors are more easily perceived than geometrical forms, isolated words than colors, and words in construction than disconnected words; that persons of visual type are slightly more rapid readers than those of the auditory type; that rapid readers, besides doing their work in less time, do superior work, retaining more of the substance of what is read and heard than do slow readers. Lip movement is a serious hindrance to speed, and consequently to intelligence, of reading. The disadvantage extends to reading aloud. Apart from external conditions, such as time of day, physical fatigue, etc., some of the influences contributing to rapidity of reading are largely physiological, as visual perception; others are of mental endowment, as alertness of mind; still others are matters of intellectual equipment rather than intellectual ability, as extent of reading and scholarly attainment.
Mr. Merton L. Miller, of the University of Chicago, says, in his preliminary study of the Pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, that he was hampered in his researches there by a circumstance that illustrates very well certain characteristics of the Indian. About fifteen years ago representatives of the Government were at Sia making investigations, and had to ask many questions. Some time after they went away there was much sickness in the pueblo, and many people died. It occurred to the Sia people that the presence of those white men, asking so many questions, was the cause of all their trouble; so they sent men to the other pueblos to warn them against white men who came to find out about their customs and beliefs. These messengers also came to Taos, and the people remembered their warning well. If a Taos Indian is caught now teaching the language or telling any of the traditions to a white man, he is liable to a whipping and a fine. This, Mr. Miller believes, accounts for the fact that he could rarely learn anything from his friend when they were at the pueblo, although when away in the mountains he became much more open and communicative.