Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/588

572 to-day. Animals have varied from one geological stratum to another, and the higher the animals, the greater has been the variation. It is to be inferred, therefore, that man has varied more than the other mammals. The problem is to discover in the Tertiary period an ancestral form of man, a predecessor of the man of historical times. There are in the Tertiary strata objects which imply the existence in that age of an intelligent being; and such objects have been found in two different stages of the epoch—in the Lower Tertiary at Thenay, and in the Upper Tertiary at Otta, in Portugal, and at Puy Courny, in Cantal. They prove that at those two distant epochs there existed in Europe animals acquainted with fire, and able, more or less, to cut stone. During the Tertiary period, then, there lived animals less intelligent than existing man, but more intelligent than existing apes, although their skeletons have not yet been discovered, only their works. To these species, the ancestral forms of historic man, M. de Mortillet would give the name of anthropopithecus, or man-ape.

Words and Things.—A writer in the "Journal of Science" remarks upon the inadequacy of language to describe motions, as in the flight of different species of butterflies; colors, except a few particularly named ones; forms, except geometrical ones; and tastes and odors, in which the failure is complete. At the same time our mental conceptions of all these things may be of the clearest, when they have once passed under observation. To this he appends the pertinent question: Seeing how very impotent is language, unaided, to convey precise knowledge, "Why is such exclusive attention paid to words, both in lower and higher education, to the almost entire neglect of things? Verbal memory is cultivated above all other faculties of the human mind. Much care is taken to train up youth in the correct use of language. But in what school is the art of observation systematically taught? Who heeds or asks whether the observing faculties are strengthened? Quite the contrary; these faculties, if perhaps not intentionally, are not the less weakened and crowded out by dominant verbalism. . . . I am not seeking to undervalue the use and study of language. It furnishes, at any rate, receptacles in which the rough outlines of our knowledge may be preserved. But it must no longer seek to maintain the exclusive position which it has usurped. It must be made to feel that it is the espalier and not the vine, the purse and not the money, the shell and not the substance."

Sands of the Turkistan Deserts.—According to an account by M. Paul Lessar, of the Russian Geographical Society, the sands of the Kara-Kum Desert of Turkistan, represented on maps by one conventional sign, are in reality very varied, and arc divisible into three principal kinds. In the country between Merv and Attok, and between Sarakhs and Chacha, the soil is clayey, largely mixed with sand; its surface is formed into hillocks, rarely more than seven feet high, and usually thickly overgrown with brushwood. This kind of desert presents no particular obstacles to the traveler. The second kind of desert consists of real sands—not, however, of a drifting nature, but everywhere knit together by bushes ten or fifteen feet high. It is only at the summits of the hillocks, which are higher than those just described, that there is a little drift-sand, which is carried from place to place. In sands of this kind, carts move with great difficulty, while horses and camels go freely. No storm need be dreaded in these deserts, for the quantity of drift-sands is so small that it can not become dangerous, though it may cause considerable discomfort. The case is, however, very different with the sands of the third kind, or the so-called barkhans. In them no tree or bush or grass-blade is to be seen; the sand is wholly of a drifting nature; and the slightest puff of wind effaces the fresh tracks of a caravan. Wherever they meet a bush they are de. posited around it by the wind in hillocks that assume a variety of shapes. When the hillocks have covered the bushes they are molded by the wind according to one pattern, in which the side exposed to the wind presents a gradually raised cone, and the reverse a sharp curve, while a section might be accurately figured by a rib. The passage of these sands is very difficult. Horses sink and are hardly able to extricate their