Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/881

Rh Nearly five hundred dollars were paid out in Michigan from July, 1889, to March, 1890, "for 15,697 sparrow-heads." Most of the birds, Mr. Cook says, were red-polled linnets—valuable birds. It would perhaps be better to protect the good birds more efficiently and not worry so much about the sparrows. That plan has had excellent results in New Jersey.

Permanency of the Earth's Features.—A paper was read in the American Geological Society by Prof. E. W. Claypole, traversing the doctrine toward which a few geologists are tending, that the sea-beds and the continental masses are permanent and date back to the original consolidation of the earth's crust. After reviewing the several arguments by which this theory is supported, the author concluded that "we have ample evidence of change of level to account for the conversion of the deep sea into dry land and vice versa, and that the absence of deep-sea deposits among the stratified rocks is not a valid objection. It would also follow that the depression may occur in any part of the world according to laws as yet unknown, but that when a depression is full of sediment re-elevation is likely to occur; that the deep ocean-beds, instead of being permanent outlines of the earth's contour, are subject to the same laws of elevation that govern the rest of nature. On this view the ocean abysses would be areas of subsidence unfilled by deposit because they were out of the reach of shore action, rather than permanent depressions on the earth's surface."

Democracy and the ChnrchesChurches [sic].—The Influence of Democracy on Religion is the subject of an article in the London Spectator, suggested by the popular enthusiasm aroused by the funeral of Mrs. Booth, of the Salvation Army. The author accepts the story of the Salvation Army, and the story of the Wesleyan movement of the last century, as testimony to the unconscious influence of democratic feeling on ecclesiastical organization; and he believes that the whole character of the Reformation and its offshoots has been gravely affected by the attraction of democratic forms and phases of feeling for religious natures. Both Judaism and Christianity have always placed the poor, and especially the poor in spirit, above those accounted the possessors of this world's privileges; and, as a consequence, these religions have struck at the heart cf slavery, and have raised women to the spiritual level of men. The earlier Protestant enthusiasm may have profited by the democratic aversion to specially privileged spiritual orders, like the priesthood and the episcopate. The recognition by the Wesleyans of the ministerial capacity of the laity, and the jealousy against a hierarchy manifested by many other of the Nonconformist churches, gave the religious world a consciousness of the popular advantage which a more emphatic development of the democratic idea in religion bestowed on those churches and sects which were founded on free choice by the laity of their ecclesiastical representatives. The Nonconformists have been compensated for their rejection of state privileges by being brought thereby nearer to the people. The influence of democratic tendencies in other churches is also marked. The universal tendency in Ireland, where the priesthood are of the class which feels most keenly the pressure of democratic principles, to modify and even defy the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in the interest of the peasantry, has been very startling. In England the Episcopal churches, both Anglican and Roman Catholic, are curiously divided between the strong democratic sympathies which their rulers feel under the pressure of public opinion and the natural leaning of their theology against anything like concession to the lawless cravings of the human heart. Roman Catholic dignitaries in England express their sympathy with Irish offenders against the law and with recalcitrant bishops in Ireland. Church congresses discuss social reforms with a disposition to find a middle ground between the old principle of individual right and liberty and the new collectivism. In the United States even Roman Catholic priests take part with the Knights of Labor and ignore the authority of their bishops. English Roman Catholics support earnestly movements known to be popular, and when there is a struggle between labor and capital the greatest man is on the side of labor, often when labor is in the wrong. Everywhere the