Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 12.djvu/682

662 the other extreme, we have the Feejeeans, Abyssinians, ancient Mexicans.

Derived from trophy-taking, and developing with the development of the militant type, it is to be anticipated that mutilations decrease as fast as the societies consolidated by militancy become less militant, and disappear as the industrial type of structure evolves. That they do so European history at large may be assigned in proof. And it is significant that in our own society, now predominantly industrial, such slight mutilations as continue are connected with that regulative part of the organization which militancy has bequeathed: there survive only the now-meaningless tattooings of sailors, the branding of deserters, and the cropping of the heads of felons.



LITERARY venture of our boyhood comes upon us like the aroma of tropical fruit eaten for the first time. An uncle had given his eight-year-old favorite a silver sixpence. Never before had the youngling possessed so much money in his own right. Soon the young capitalist found himself confronting the shop-window of the nearest stationer, where his eyes became riveted to a little book "Life and Voyages of La Pérouse," price sixpence. The book was eagerly bought, and it proved an exciting morceau. This same Jean François de Galaup, Count de la Pérouse, when about thirty-seven years old, served in the American Revolution. In 1782 he led a small fleet into Hudson Bay, and destroyed the English trading-post. But Louis XVI. found that, while he had been helping to wrest the colonies from Great Britain, she was adding to herself new glory, and vast territories, by the discoveries of her great navigator, Captain Cook. So the French monarch dispatched La Pérouse, with two ships, on a mission of exploration in the Pacific. Neither the bold navigator nor any of his men saw home again. The last known of the expedition was from a letter written by La Pérouse at Botany Bay, February 7, 1788. Three years after, a French squadron was sent to search for the great voyageur, but in vain. With this expedition went as naturalist the famous botanist La Billardière. In Tasmania he found the most extraordinary arboreal flora he had ever seen. Especially wonderful for number and size was one tree, to which he gave the generic name Eucalyptus, meaning "well-covered," alluding to the singular form of the flower-bud, which has on it an operculum or cover not unlike the lid of a tiny sugar-bowl (see the object between the flower and the fruit at foot of Fig. 3). Thus the