Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/469

 conclusions. The original faults of statistics are great enough, but the faults resulting from ignorant comparisons are greater still. On the whole, however, enormous as have been the errors, false as have been many of the statistical statements of official reports, inaccurate as have been many of the calculations, and fallacious and almost monstrous as have been many of the inferences, political economy has, nevertheless, profited greatly by what has been accomplished. The errors are gradually disappearing, and a very considerable remainder of truth has been left. We know far more than did our fathers of the progress of population, the resources of the nation, the earnings of the people, the cost of living, the efficiency of labor, more of criminal conditions, of mortality in town and country, of vagrancy and pauperism, of crowding and immigration; and, in fact, know more of all the conditions of life which make up sociology. Legislators and philanthropists could ill spare their statistical guides, lame and delusive though they be, for “know thyself” applies to nations as well as to men, and that nation which neglects to study its own conditions and affairs in the most searching and critical manner must fall into retrogression. History is, indeed, statistics ever advancing, and statistics is stationary history. Science is best taught by examples of errors. This is to statistical art what a chapter of fallacies is to logic. 

 to Mr. T. W. Cowan, as quoted in Nature, who has written of the natural history, anatomy, and physiology of that insect, the bee can draw twenty times its own weight; its flight exceeds four miles an hour, and it will go four miles in search of food. Its wings, braced together in flight by a row of booklets, bear it forward or backward, with upward, downward, or suddenly arrested course, by a beautiful mechanical adaptation which is described in the book. Its voice organs are threefold: the vibrating wings, the vibrating rings of the abdomen, and a true vocal apparatus in the breathing aperture or spiracle. The first two produce the buzz; while the hum—which is “surly, cheerful, or colloquially significant”—is due to the vocal membrane. Some of the bee's notes have been interpreted: “Huumm” is the cry of contentment; “Wuh nuh-nnh” glorifies the incessant accouchements of the queen; “Shu-u-u” is the frolic note of young bees at play “Ssss” means the muster of a swarm; “Brrr” the slaughter or expulsion of the drones: and the “Tu-tu-tu” of the newly hatched young queen is answered by the “Qua-qua-qua” of the queens still imprisoned in their cells.

The soundings of the Austrian vessel, the Pola, in the Mediterranean Sea, show that the water in the central basin of that sea is warmer, denser, and richer in salt than that of the western basin. As to transparency, a white disk was visible down to a depth of forty-three metres, but photographic plates were affected by light down to five hundred metres. No free carbonic acid was found in the water, and the amount of oxygen in solution was the same at the bottom as at the surface. 