You will find something about the Junior Republic in the next number of the Magazine.
About the ex-Empress Carlotta of Mexico, we have no fresh news for you.
Editor
Dear Editor:
Our teacher in the Germantown Academy reads to us the paper which you call The Great Round World. The Great Round World and Harper's Round Table I consider the best papers for boys of which I have any knowledge. I would like to know whether the whale could walk on land, as other animals do. My father told me that the whale was in its former condition a land animal, which had changed its home to the water.
Yours respectfully,
Franz W.
Germantown, PA., June 14th, 1897.
Dear Franz:
Whales are in many respects the most interesting and wonderful of creatures. It would seem that at one time they may have been land creatures, and able to walk on land as other animals do. That is, however, so very remote that we have no record of it. Scientific men base their arguments in favor of this theory on the facts that whales are not true fish, but are indeed land mammals adapted to living in the water.
Their fore-limbs, though reduced to mere paddles, have all the bones, joints, and even most of the muscles, nerves, and arteries of the human arm and hand. The rudiments of hind-legs are found buried deep in the interior of the animal, and in the young whales bristles about the chin and upper lip give evidence that the whales have once been covered with hair like other mammals.
The blubber is also arranged by nature as a means for keeping their bodies warm. True fishes are cold-blooded animals, and not sensible to differences of temperature.
All these different facts make people think that at some very remote period whales were land animals.