Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/369

 whom, by the hypothesis, the primitive Aryan language was generated, may have formed a separate race as far back as the Pleistocene epoch, when the first unquestionable records of man make their appearance, I do not see that he goes beyond possibility—though, of course, that is a very different thing from proving his case. But, if the blond long-heads are thus ancient, the problem of their primitive seat puts on an altogether new aspect. Speculation must take into account climatal and geographical conditions widely different from those which obtain in northern Eurasia at the present day. During much of the vast length of the Pleistocene period, it would seem that men could no more have lived either in Britain north of the Thames, or in Scandinavia, or in northern Germany, or in northern Russia, than they can live now in the interior of Greenland, seeing that the land was covered by a great ice sheet like that which at present shrouds the latter country. At that epoch, the blond long-heads can not reasonably be supposed to have occupied the regions in which we meet with them in the oldest times of which history has kept a record.

But even if we are content to assume a vastly less antiquity for the Aryan race; if we only make the assumption, for which there is considerable positive warranty, that it has existed in Europe ever since the end of the Pleistocene period—when the fauna and flora assumed approximately their present condition and the state of things called Recent by geologists set in—we have to reckon with a distribution of land and water, not only very different from that which at present obtains in northern Eurasia, but of such a nature that it can hardly fail to have exerted a great influence on the development and the distribution of the races of mankind.—Nineteenth Century.

[To be continued.]



HE problem how to save and store up the enormous amount of natural energy which is daily dissipated in producing natural phenomena has long occupied the attention of scientists. During the last fifteen years this attention has been especially directed toward electricity as an agent. This is, perhaps, because the majority of the really active investigators have been occupied in this department of science, or perhaps the popular superstitious credulity that electricity can be made to do anything, has, to a certain extent, taken possession of the scientific mind. At any rate, the result of experiments has been the development of the 