Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 22.djvu/145

Rh exists off Florida, gradually narrowing as it goes north. Off the Carolinas it is forty or fifty miles wide. Near Savannah soundings were made at 1,840 fathoms. The 500 and 1,000 fathom lines are very close to the 100 fathom line north of Cape Hatteras and up to the Georges Bank off Massachusetts. Directly beneath the Gulf Stream is a hard coral limestone, with no loose material. The globigerina begins to appear at Charleston going north, and increases in amount. The cold water from the Arctic region flows inside the Gulf Stream off the American coast, and beneath it, falling down a depth of a thousand fathoms. The Bahama section showed a temperature of 44° at 459 fathoms, and washes in through the Windward Islands, south of Cuba, rather than through the Florida Channel. Outside the ridge, between Cuba and Hayti, the temperature descended to 36°, but the coldest found in the Gulf of Mexico was 39° down to 3,400 fathoms. There is no Gulf Stream in the Gulf of Mexico.

Indian Marriage Laws.—A paper on this subject, read by the Rev. J. Owen Dorsey before the American Association, notices some remarkable customs in relation to marriage and kinship as prevailing among the Dhegitha Indians, particularly the Omahas and Poncas.

When a tribe is hunting it camps, by gentes or nations, in a circle, each gens bearing the name of some animal. All the members of one gens are relatives, and marriage between members of one gens is absolutely forbidden. Membership in a gens is by descent in the male line, not in the female. The relations of a man are denoted by colors; for example—black, grand-father or grandmother; blue, father or mother. His connections are denoted by mixed colors, such as a pink head and skirt, with light-blue triangle on the body, for sister-in-law. A man can marry his brother's widow, and her children call him father even before their father's death. His sister's children are only nephews and nieces. His mother's sister is always called mother for the same reason, and even his paternal grandfather's brother's son is his father. These, and many other distinctions, show that the terms of relationship are far more numerous and complicated with the Omahas than with us. A man may marry any woman belonging to another gens, whether connected with him or not; though marriage into his mother's gens is also forbidden. A man can not marry any woman to whom he is related by the ceremony of the calumet-dance. Sometimes a man may take the children of his deceased brother without their mother herself. Sometimes the dying husband, knowing that his male kindred are bad, tells his wife to marry out of his gens. If a widower remains single for two, three, or four years, he must remain so for ever. Widows, however, must wait four years before remarrying. The same system prevails among the Iowas, Otos, and Missouris.

Hygiene in House-Walls.—Mr. T. R. Baker, in a paper read before the American Association, "On the Permeability of the Linings of House-Walls to Air," assumed that ordinary wall-paper made the walls of dwellings nearly air-tight. Hygienically considered, the walls of a house should be porous, like our clothing, so that our bodies can have through them, as also through our clothing, free intercourse with the external air. Compact wall linings, even if their minute pores are open, greatly interfere with this intercourse; but if their pores are closed with water, as when the walls are damp, it is almost completely cut off; and such linings increase the dampness of walls by preventing their drying in wet weather. The prolonged dampness also prolongs other evils produced by damp walls; therefore wallpapers and their substitutes should be condemned, and the old-fashioned whitewashed walls commended.

Succession of North American Flora.—Professor J. S. Newberry, describing the evolution of the North American flora, at the meeting of the American Association, said that the first flora was that indicated by the plumbago of the Laurentian formation. The kind of vegetation can not be determined. The second is in the Silurian. The evidence of actual vegetable origin is, however, defective; the objects may be corals rather than land-plants. The third flora is in the Upper Silurian; the fourth is in the Devonian. Two hundred species