Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/586

570 succumbed to geologic causes and became extinct, Limulus survived the most stupendous changes of land and sea. Whatever the species of the San Francisco specimen may be, as the first one taken in the Pacific waters it is highly interesting. But, supposing the specimen to be correctly determined as the species Polyphemus, that becomes a fact of very high significance. Although our Eastern king-crab survived the subsidence of large land areas, and the localizing of new seas, it was shut into a very circumscribed habitat—the eastern waters of the North Atlantic and the West Indies, and not even found in South America. In a word, it is an Atlantic form, and in its new habitat furnishes a fact as remarkable as if an African Hon should be discovered in the American forests. It is almost a certainty that its appearance on the Pacific coast comes of an accidental introduction of some Limulus-eggs at the time that the United States Fish Commission introduced into the California waters a lot of lobsters taken from the East, as an experiment in stocking the Pacific coast. This was seven or eight years ago. The above fact is another illustration of the faunal and floral distribution brought about by man, often, as in this instance, by sheer accident. In the parlance of geologic time, it is a certainty that all plant and animal forms, however restricted their habitats in Nature may be, if they will bear acclimatizing, will soon become so cosmopolitan that their history as indigenes can only be obtained from libraries, where their life records shall be found as the published work of the naturalists of to-day.

Education and Crime.—The London "Spectator" remarks that the old idea that education would of itself extirpate crime has gradually been dissipated by experience. "It was a foolish idea a priori, for there is nothing in the mere development of intelligence to remove the original causes of crime or to cure either malice, or lust, or greed; and it died away before the evidence that education rather changes the form of some kinds of criminality than extinguishes criminality itself. The educated man swindles when the boor would steal, but the instinct of thievishness is the same in both, while greed is slightly increased by education." It does not even make all men intelligent, for "the new Anarchist faction, which rejects all the teaching, not only of history, but of the commonest facts of experience, and even the conclusions of arithmetic, is led by educated men, sometimes of high intellectual attainments." M. Elisée Reel us, author of most delightful and learned geographical books, is an anarchist; Prince Krapotkine, who counsels the destruction of society by force, is a man of unusual cultivation; Mr. Hyndman, who, while he disclaims anarchism, avows a desire to seize all capital, equalize all men, and compel all to labor, is a graduate of London University; and many of the cosmopolitan revolutionists are men familiar with many literatures. We have further been told, time and again, and are still told, by the advocates of popular education, that that would be in itself a strong guarantee for social order. Education has gone on diffusing its benefits among larger proportions of mankind; and now while New England, Scotland, and Prussia, formerly among the most educated states, were also the most orderly, there are in Germany five hundred thousand socialists"; and "all over the Western world, discontent with the order of society, especially upon points which can not be altered, appears to grow deeper and more violent." Thus, while education may still give us much in the end, "the old enthusiastic hopes from it were, as regards the time of their fruition, evidently illusory. It is no more a panacea than any other, and the good it does is as slow to develop itself as the good that rain does. We have all been just like the poor, and have expected pleasant results too soon, and from mere decrees, and from too little labor."

Traits of the Somaulis.—Mr. F. L. James has given an account of an exploration made early in 1884 into the Somauli country of East Africa, in which he penetrated to places where he was the first European visitor. The people seem in many ways to approach more nearly to the ancient Egyptians than any other African race with which the author is acquainted. Their swords are exactly like those used by the ancient Egyptians. Every Somauli carries two spears, a shield, and a short sword, and