Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/773

Rh swept over a portion of the States of Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin, on the memorable evening of May 18, 1883. By this storm, sixty-five persons were killed and two hundred wounded in the State of Illinois alone; and yet the percentage of lives lost was small compared with the immense value of property destroyed.

As the matter now stands, the tornado seems to remain a problem that baffles science—a veritable despot in the economy of nature. The puny arm of man is powerless against it; no structure he can rear will successfully resist it, coming off unscathed in the conflict; and no device his mind can plan will turn it aside from its chosen course. Experience has amply demonstrated that the safest place in the hour of such danger is found in some subterranean retreat.

 

T follows from the exposition given in our former article that man, issuing from a "mother-region" still undetermined, but which a number of considerations indicate to have been in the North, has radiated in several directions; that his migrations have been constantly from north to south; and that they have given rise to races the more ancient of which went farthest and were the most inferior. The superior races were those which, migrating later and becoming localized in peculiarly favorable climatic conditions, have risen gradually to what we call civilization.

M. de Mortillet has occupied himself with this progress, and, persuaded that existing mankind is only a resultant, and the last term of a series of successive transformations, distinguishes between several men, as tertiary man, quaternary man, existing man. The man of the ancient quaternary, the Neanderthal, the Denise, and the Canstadt man, appear to him so different from the historical type, that not only does he separate them from it, but he creates for the times anterior to the quaternary a human or pseudo-human category of a particular order. There were, in his view, "precursors of man," to which he applies the significant name of antropopithecus, or "man-monkey," because he believes they preceded man in the scale of beings, and constituted an intermediate type between the living anthropomorphic apes and man. We should then have to deal with a creature high enough above the gorilla and the chimpanzee to know how to cut flints and use fire, low enough not to be able to rise above that industrial grade and become a real man; or with a race standing to the Bushman and Tasmanian as they seem to stand to us. Theology does not 