Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/94

84  to carry the vessel away, and that it would be better to cover it from the weather and leave it where it was found. Only the smaller objects were taken to Christiania.

Antiquaries have agreed in ascribing the epoch of the erection of the tumulus to the most ancient iron age, or to the ninth or tenth century of our era—most probably to the age of Harold the Fair-haired, founder of the Norwegian state.

Dr. V. Gross, of Neuveville, Switzerland, has furnished a description of an ancient canoe which was found in April, 1880, buried in the ground near the shores of the Lake of Bienne, and which has been placed in the museum at Neuveville. It is of oak, and differs somewhat in shape from similar canoes that have been found heretofore. The stern has the square form of modern boats, and the prow



is adorned with a spur-shaped prolongation (Fig. 3). The boat is 9·55 metres (or a little more than thirty feet) long, from two and a half to three feet broad, and about nineteen inches deep. Rounded notches at intervals along the sides seem to have been intended as rests for oars. A piece of about five feet by nine inches appears to have been broken or taken out of one of the sides near the stern, the place of which may have been supplied by a plank. In order to preserve the form of the vessel against warping and shrinkage, it was soaked in boiled linseed-oil to which colophene was afterward added. The application, after a sufficient number of repetitions, was attended by such satisfactory results that Dr. Gross has no hesitation in recommending it for all objects that are too bulky to be put in glycerine.—La Nature.

 

HERE is a schoolhouse in a convenient little by-street in Boston, which is visited weekly by scholars and scientists, specialists of renown and commonplace fathers and mothers, philanthropists and seekers after the curious, and from its doors not one turns away without being surprised and touched.

The Horace Mann School for the Deaf, in Warrenton Street, is one of the latest developments of that great humanitarian movement which rose like a miracle in the last half of the eighteenth century, one of the few sunbeams which have come to us from those dark and 