Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/327

Rh the sources of this river; to determine the succession of its freshets; to define the origin and nature of the elements which they have brought down; to follow these elements from stage to stage, and thus discover the road which each of them has followed to its landing-place—in other words, to construct the history of the migrations of the different American peoples.

The accomplishment of this task will, as I have already said, present other and more difficulties in America than in Polynesia. Those who approach it will have recourse to nothing like the historical charts and the genealogies of which are composed the oral archives religiously preserved in all the islands of the Pacific. But modern science has resources of which we are gaining better and better comprehension of the power. Joining the data furnished by the study of the strata and their fossils, by comparative craniology, linguistics, and ethnography, we can enter on the mass of problems and foresee their solution. Serious efforts have been already made in this direction, and they have not been unfruitful. From this time we shall be able to indicate on the map a considerable number of itineraries, but they are so far partial and local. They are as yet no more than fragments, like those which Hale's predecessors could point to in Oceania.

The time may be long in coming, but let not Americanists lose heart. Every new discovery, of however little importance it may seem at first, will bring them nearer to the end. From year to year these fragments, now isolated and scattered, will join and be co-ordinated with one another; and some day the map of American migrations will be delineated, from Asia to Greenland and Cape Horn, as the map of Polynesian migrations has been drawn, from the Indian Archipelago to Easter Island, and from New Zealand to the Sandwich Islands.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

to M. J. Roche, the telephone was fore-fancied by Charles Bourseul, who said, in 1854: "Imagine that one can speak at a mobile plate so flexible as to lose none of the vibrations produced by the voice, and that this plate in succession establishes and interrupts the communication in an electric pile, and that you have another plate at a distance to execute the same vibrations at exactly the same times. . . . I believe it is certain that, in a more or less distant future, speech will in some such way as this be transmitted to a distance by electricity."

theory of the European origin of the Aryan race is supported by Canon Isaac Taylor in his book on the origin of the Aryans. Inquiring which of the many races speaking the Aryan languages is the one in which the Aryan form of speech may be presumed to have originated, he numbers four such. They are the Iberians; the race represented by the Swedes and North Germans; the Ligurians, including the Auvergnats and the French Basques; and the Celto Slavic race. As among these, he decides upon the Celto-Slavs as the nearest to the primitive Aryan stock.