Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/441

Rh irregular formation, the tangled floss from filatures, and raw silk more or less tangled in the silk-mill. It is pure silk that can not be reeled. It is prepared for spinning by the most delicate processes, and when ready looks like the whitest of combed fleeces, and has a luster equal to that of spun glass. It can be spun with perfect smoothness and of any size. Spun and reeled silks are becoming more and more interchangeable in the manufacture of fabrics. The two methods of making cheap, showy silks are either by weighting slight material with dyestuff, or by using spun silk. Brocades for ball and wedding-dresses are often of spun silk.

American-made handkerchiefs, scarfs, neckties, and millinery goods, compete successfully with the foreign supply, and keep down prices for consumers. In ribbons our success is complete. Only inferior ribbons are now imported in any quantity. In comparison with ours the foreign ribbons are over-weighted and of inferior silk. The designs originate in our own factories, and are much admired abroad. They are made upon power-looms, of which we have the best in the world. In the making of trimmings and of lace, the details given in this work are very interesting, but we have no more space at our command. We must also omit the subject of dyeing, which, though the last in order, is by no means the least interesting.

The remainder of the volume is taken up with statistics of the silk manufacture; and the "Seventh Annual Report of the Silk Association of America," in which the progress of the past year is summarized, is also added.

scientific world is chiefly indebted to the late Professor Hartt for recent accurate and detailed investigations of the geological structure of eastern Brazil, and of the lower Amazon and its tributaries. But the untimely death of Professor Hartt, with various other causes, has delayed the publication of the extensive reports he had prepared; and we have in the present pamphlet a résumé of the work which they cover, furnished by his friend and assistant Mr. Derby. The author also includes the results of some of his own researches in the same field, made subsequently to those of Professor Hartt. The great valley of the Amazon, according to these investigators, first appeared in early Silurian times as a wide strait between two islands or groups of islands, one forming the base of the Brazilian plateau, and the other that of the plateau of Guiana. The rise of the Andes converted the western part of the strait into a basin, and subsequent oscillations have determined the character and succession of deposits in the geological development of the region. The evolution of the great valley terminated with the formation of the vast flood-plain which now covered with forest extends from the Atlantic to the foot of the Andes.

book will do very well as a stepping-stone to the ethnological treatises of Tylor, Lubbock, Bancroft, and Peschell, on the life of the lower races of mankind. It gives an entertaining account of the ideas, habits, and peculiarities of savage and half-civilized tribes, taking up in successive chapters their "Myths and Beliefs," their "Modes of Prayer," "Proverbs," "Moral Philosophy," "Political Life," "Penal Laws," "Wedding Customs," "Fairy Lore," and "Comparative Folk Lore." The author writes in a liberal spirit, but rather avoids the controversial topics raised by investigators in this field. In his introduction he remarks:

The vexed question, whether savage life represents a primitive or a decadent condition, whether it represents what man at first everywhere was, or only what he may become, has throughout the following chapters been avoided, that controversy being regarded as "laid" by the exhaustive researches of Mr. Tylor and other writers. But, while the state of the lowest modern savages is taken as the nearest approximation we have of the primitive state from which mankind has risen, it is not pretended that the state of any particular tribe may not be one to which it has fallen. As the low position of many Bushmen tribes is quite explicable by their long border warfare with the Dutch, and the consequent cruelties they wore exposed to, or as the state of many Brazilian savages may be traced to similar contact with the Portuguese, so any ease of extreme savagery may be the