Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/585

Rh, or Manakji, the son of Kavasji, the carpenter. At the age of about seven years, the child receives the investiture of the holy shirt and girdle, accompanied with ceremonies calculated to impress him with the solemnity of the act, among which is his recital of the confession of faith in the Zoroastrian religion. The sadarah, or holy shirt, is a light, short muslin garment, worn next to the body; the kosti, or holy girdle, is a thin woolen cord of seventy-two threads, passed thrice round the waist and tied with four knots. The wearer, in tying the first knot, declares his belief in the doctrine of the one God, and at the second knot his faith in Zoroaster as the true prophet. In tying the last knot he says, "Perform good actions and abstain from evil ones." It is his duty, as soon as he has risen from sleep, to put on his kosti, wash his hands, and put wood on the fire. The astrologer has no place in the ceremony of investiture, but he presides over the arrangement of marriages, which take place early and usually between near relatives. The betrothal, the astrologer having pronounced the signs favorable, is made complete by the mere exchange between the parents of new dresses for the boy and girl.

Origin of Cancer.—Dr. H. Percy Dunn, of the West London Hospital, who has given attention to the study of cancer and the investigation of the causes of its increase in civilized countries, controverts the opinion that the disease is hereditary. The fact is admitted that cancer appears frequently consecutively in certain families, but this is not considered sufficient of itself to constitute an hereditary quality, while all the other characteristics of hereditary disease are absent. It fails to fulfill Quatrefages's definition of the hereditary quality, of becoming an agent of variation, and transmitting and accumulating the modifying actions of the conditions of life. But, while cancer is not transmissible as a disease, the predisposition to it may be inherited. The term predisposition is vague and hard to define, but may be described generally as "the shadow of a disease, as a disease without its substance—the reflection, as it were, in the offspring, distinct from the repetition of the morbid types common to one or both parents." The strongest element in the production of cancer is age, and it is most likely to appear between the thirty-fifth or fortieth and the sixtieth years. The disease may also be regarded as climatic or racial, prevailing most in the English climate and among the English people. It prevails most largely among women, and of them most with those who have had children. It is so prominently a nervous disease that Dr. Dunn gives his assent to the opinion that it may be and often is provoked by nervous shock. He, therefore, recognizes the expediency of preventing persons of middle age from being exposed to such shocks. In this relation to the nervous system, which is so trying in our busy age, is perhaps to be found the reason of the rapidly accelerated increase of cancer which has been lately remarked upon in England.

The King-Crab in New Waters.—Quite a sensation was stirred up among the fishermen of San Francisco on the 26th of May by the discovery of what was supposed to be a new crustacean. The creature was taken in the waters off the Farallone Islands by Captain Camilio, who was fishing there in his smack. When seen by some members of the United States Geological Survey, the "new crab" proved to be an old acquaintance, the Limulus Polyphemus, so common in the waters of the Eastern coast, where it is known as the king-crab on account of its great size, and the horse-foot crab because of its form. The living genus Limulus, if we reject two doubtful forms, has but three species our own L. Polyphemus, the L. moluccanus of the Spice Islands, and L. rotundicaudus of the Chinese and the Japanese waters. Geologically considered, this strange creature has the highest antiquity of any of the crustaceans. And its place in nature is a problem of profound difficulty. Dr. Samuel Lockwood, so long ago as 1869, showed that in form the larval Limulus was identical with the trilobite. Since then embryological and anatomical study has shown that the animal is not a crab, and it is now even doubtful which it favors most, the position of an aquatic scorpion or an aquatic arachnidan; for it really seems to have structural elements of both the spider and the scorpion. It is also interesting to know that, while the trilobite