Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/289

Rh without inhabitant, without mails, without roads, and with only an occasional party of Indians or explorers, following the ancient and overgrown trails of two centuries ago." Fires have denuded the region of its primitive forests; but the older burnings are becoming overgrown with thickets of aspen, white paper birch, cherry, etc. A few remnants of the original forest are occasionally found; and various shrubs and low herbs occur. Many small tracts of deep and productive soil intervene between the almost universal rocky or thinly covered exposures. The summer climate was agreeable, with sunny days as the rule during two seasons. No experience was had of the winter climate. The character of the country covered by Mr. H. V. Winchell's Rainy Lake survey varies greatly in different regions. In the vicinity of Rainy and the neighboring lakes, it is very rocky, while west of these lakes the surface consists of drift deposits, and the underlying rock appears only at rapids and waterfalls in the streams and a few places in the midst of the forest. The region within the limits of the glacial lake Agassiz is now covered with a fine growth of timber, both hard and soft wood, and is excellent farming land.

Old Cyclopædias.—The most extensive, and one of the oldest of cyclopædias is the Chinese work, the name of which may be translated as the "Thesaurus of Writings Ancient and Modern," compiled under the scholarly Emperor Kang Hi, which was printed toward the close of the last century. It was the fruit of forty years of labor, and filled 5,020 volumes; but this by no means implies that it was as large as a European book of that number of volumes would be. Pliny's "Natural History" may be regarded as the oldest European encyclopaedia. The "Speculum Majus" of Vincent de Beauvais, in the thirteenth century, was divided into 10,000 chapters, several of which were subdivided alphabetically. About a hundred years later came the "De Proprietatibus Rerum" of the English Franciscan Bartholomew de Glanville, which was translated into the English of the day. Johann Alsted's "Encyclopædia" (1630) was one of the first works that bore the name. The anonymous "Universal Historical Geographical, Chronological, and Classical Dictionary" (1703), a nearly forgotten work, is said to be "full, concise, lively, and, all things considered, wonderfully accurate," but some very funny statements made in it are pointed out. In the next year was published Dr. Harris's "Lexicon Technicum, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences," which has been given the credit, that of right belongs to the preceding work, of being the first alphabetical encyclopaedia written in English. Next to these works follow the generation of cyclopaedias which are still known among us, beginning with Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) and D'Alembert and Diderot's great work, and coming down to the new edition of the "Britannica," Stephen's "Dictionary of National Biography," and Appletons' "American Cyclopædia" and their "Cyclopædia of American Biography."

The Ice-Cap of Greenland. Dr. Frithiof Nansen showed, in the British Association, in opposition to Nordenskiöld's opinion, that the part of Greenland which his expedition had traversed is covered with a shell-shaped mantle of ice and snow, under which mountains, as well as valleys, have quite disappeared, and where the configuration of the land and mountains can not be traced. The ice covering rises rather regularly but rapidly from the east coast to a height of nine or ten thousand feet, is rather flat and even in the middle, and falls off again regularly toward the west coast. There must be mountains and valleys in the interior of Greenland as well as on the coast. It is already known that there are on the coasts deep fiords and lofty mountains very like those of western Norway, and that they have in some places just the same wild and prominent character. If we entertain the opinion that these fiords were excavated by the ice, we must also conclude that the same ice has been able to excavate valleys and form mountains in the interior of the continent. We have no right, therefore, to seek the reason of the shield-like shape of the ice in the configuration of the land underneath its surface. It must have a shape of its own, which was given, not by the land, but by the meteorological circumstances. Nobody could deny that the ice might in some places have an enormous thickness, as it