Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/325

Rh who are darker than white men, may be thus accounted for. It is thus that in India millions who speak Hindoo languages show by their tint that their race is mixed between that of the Aryan conquerors of the land and its darker indigenes. An instructive instance of this very combination is to be seen in the gypsies, low-caste wanderers who found their way from India and spread over Europe not many centuries since. Fig. 24, a gypsy woman from Wallachia, is a favorable type of these latest incomers from the East, whose broken-down Hindoo dialect shows that part of their ancestry comes from our Aryan forefathers, while their complexion, swarthiest in the population of our country, marks also descent belonging to a darker zone of the human species.

Thus to map out the nations of the world among a few main varieties of man, and their combinations, is, in spite of its difficulty and uncertainty, a profitable task. But to account for the origin of these great primary varieties or races themselves, and exactly to assign to them their earliest homes, can not be usefully attempted in the present scantiness of evidence.

 

HE word "forestry" has not yet come into familiar use in this country, and its meaning is understood only by the few; "school of forestry" is still less comprehensible. It is only natural that our people, occupying a region covered to a great extent with a dense and varied growth of trees, in regard to which no apprehension of deficiency has been suggested until within a comparatively short time, should have entertained little thought of the forest as a thing to be specially cared for and cultivated. Much less should it have occurred to them to make its maintenance an object of scientific study, to put the school and the wood, education and trees, into close association, and to think and speak of "schools of forestry."

Both these terms, however, are well understood abroad, and the time has come, in the changed condition of things here, when we should know what they mean, and that practically.

The "school of forestry," or whatever equivalent may be used in different countries, signifies an organization for the purpose of giving instruction in regard to all that pertains to the growth of trees, especially in masses, and their management, including their natural history, their adaptation to the arts, and their influence upon human welfare. It regards the forest in altogether a different light from that in which it is considered with us, or in fact from that in which it has been considered in any country until within a comparatively recent 