Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/880

860 They are still an uncorrupted, hospitable, frank, natural people. Their principal weapon is the blow-pipe, discharging poisoned arrows. The most important nation on the Funis are the Ipurinas, or Cangiti, who dwell in numerous hordes, under different names, in the head-water regions. They are a proud, warlike race, of vindictive disposition, cunning, and treacherous. They are still partly anthropophagous. Domestic animals are rarely kept among them; tobacco is taken as snuff; and poisoned weapons are generally used. In the region of the source of the Rio Acre other Indian races of great interest to ethnologists dwell, possessing richly carved huts for ceremonies, stone figures, and idols. The caoutchouc trade, with its reckless gains, exercises a most disastrous effect upon the Indians; nevertheless, that element might become of the highest importance to the immense but thinly peopled province of the Amazon, if only a judicious and conscientious treatment was adopted as the means of bringing the aborigines within the bounds of civilization.

The Pallas Cormorant.—Pallas's Cormorant, or the great spectacled cormorant (Phalacrocorax perspicillatus) has gone to keep company with the great auk, as a bird that has become extinct within the last forty or fifty years. It is so rare in collections that only four specimens are known to exist in museums, no one has its eggs, and no bones had been found or preserved till Mr. Leonhard Stejneger collected a few of them some years ago on the Commander Islands. It was reported very abundant on Bering Island by Steller in 1741, and the only material for Pallas's description of it was derived from his observations. The specimens in the British, St. Petersburg, and Leyden Museums were obtained from a governor of Sitka, and these are all that are known to be in existence. Several pictures of the bird have been published. Mr. Stejneger was informed by the natives of Bering Island that the meat of this species was more palatable than that of its congeners, and was used as food in preference to any other. According to Steller, the weight of the cormorant varied from twelve to fourteen pounds, so that one bird was sufficient for three starving men of his shipwrecked crew. The value of the cormorant as food, and its sluggishness, contributed to its extermination. The bones found by Mr. Stejneger have been examined and described by Mr. Frederick A. Lucas; and a full account of them, with the history of the bird, is given in a reprint from the proceedings of the National Museum.

Relative Abundance of the Chemical Elements.—An estimate of the relative abundance of the chemical elements in the atmosphere, ocean, and that part of the crust of the earth which is accessible, has been made by Prof. F. W. Clarke. Separate calculations are made for the atmosphere and the ocean. The estimate of the constitution of the crust is made from the means of 880 analyses of volcanic and crystalline rocks from different places of the United States and Europe. Averaging the whole, the author finds oxygen constituting 49·98 per cent; silicon, 25·30 per cent; aluminum, 7·26 per cent; iron, 5·08 per cent; calcium, 3·57 per cent; and after these, in order, magnesium, sodium, potassium, hydrogen, titanium, carbon, chlorine, bromine, phosphorus, manganese, sulphur, barium, nitrogen, and chromium. Other substances are supposed to be present in less proportions than five one-hundredths of one per cent. The most surprising feature in the estimate is the relative abundance of titanium, which is placed before phosphorus, manganese, and sulphur. It is, however, rarely absent from the older rocks; is almost universally present in soils and clays; and is often concentrated in great quantities in beds of iron ore. Having no very striking characteristics and but little commercial importance, it is easily overlooked, and so has a popular reputation for scarcity which it does not deserve.

The Summit of Kilim-anjaro.—The ascent to the summit of Kilima-njaro, the highest mountain in Africa, was accomplished by Dr. Hans Meyer in October, 1889. The base of the ice-cap of Kibo was reached at 18,270 feet above the sea. The upper part of this ascent was extremely toilsome, as the surface of the ice became increasingly corroded, taking the form which Gussfeldt, on Aconcagua, in Chili, called nieve penitente; honeycombed to a depth of over six feet,