Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/856

 open water is very wide, the whales may pass at a distance unnoticed, or so far off that it is impossible for a boat to overtake them.

If there is much loose ice, the crafty animals take advantage of it, and come up to breathe at little holes among the floes where a boat can not reach them.

As the season advances, the whales grow scarcer, and the whalemen relax their vigilance and pay more attention to the capture of seals, which they shoot through the head when they rise near the boat, securing them with light harpoons before they have time to sink. At this season, also, the whale-boats some times capture walrus and white whales.

At length several days pass without a whale being seen, and one by one the crews give up looking for them and bring home their boats, until by the first of July the whaling is over for the year, the boats are all in, and everybody is preparing to leave the village for the summer excursions.



FEW years prior to the widely spread interest in American archæology that is now taken, there was published in Philadelphia a small duodecimo volume of two hundred pages entitled Notes on the Floridian Peninsula, concerning which its author states in his preface, "The present little work is the partial result of odd hours spent in the study of the history. . . of the peninsula of Florida" A "little" book, in one sense, it is true, but far from it in all others, and it remains to-day our best résumé of the archæology of that wonderful peninsula. The author of this volume, but twenty-two years old at the time of its appearance, is the subject of the present sketch—

Dr. Brinton was born May 13, 1837, at Thornbury, Chester County, Pa., and is of English descent on both the paternal and maternal side. His ancestor, William Brinton, came from Shropshire, where the family had lived for many generations. He became an early member of the Society of Friends, and emigrated to the colony of Pennsylvania in 1684. His descendants have generally continued their attachment to Quakerism.

The life-long interest which he has taken in the study of the American Indians may have been owing to the fact that on his father's farm was a "village site" of some ancient encampment of the Delaware Indians. Many a day of his boyhood was passed in collecting from this and similar localities the broken 