Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/249

Rh children disporting themselves, men and women thrashing grain and occasionally a crowd of disputants all combine to make it a very indifferent thoroughfare. Most of the houses are inns or eating-shops. The main gate of the inn leads directly from the street into a quadrangle bounded on two sides by open sheds, which are provided with troughs for the feeding of pack-animals, and on the other two sides by the guest-rooms and kitchen. The court-yard is often dominated by a powerful pig-stye, and littered with fodder or earthenware pitchers and vats." General agriculture is, however, not so elaborate and fruitful as in Japan and southern China. "The principal farm animal is the ox; in mid-Korea he is a splendid beast–hardy, tractable, and bearing a strong resemblance in build to our short-horned stock. A cane or iron ring, for which his nostrils are pierced when young, suffices to control him, and he is early accustomed to his constant work of load-carrying. Plowing is done with the ox; rarely or never with the pony. Dairy produce is unknown, or nearly so. Draught cattle and ponies are fed on coarse fodder and a boiled slush of beans, chopped straw, and rice-husks. The remaining domestic animals are black, hairy pigs, wily gaunt creatures, and horribly loathsome; wolfish dogs, possessing a surprising nose for foreigners; and fowls that almost equal their wild congeners, the pheasants, in powers of flight and wariness."

An incident which happened to Mr. Campbell during his journey in which a woman by bullying and coaxing forced a party of unwilling bearers into his service—gave a fresh blow in his mind to the theory of the subjection of women in the East, and strengthened his opinion that "women in these parts of the world, if the truth were known, fill a higher place and wield a far greater influence than they are usually credited with."

a paper read before the French Association for the Advancement of Science, on the Succession of Media inhabited by the Ancestral Series of Man, M. Fauvelle presented a genealogical table of beings in which, waiving the question of plants, he showed forth the successive development of animals, beginning in sea-water, continuing afterward in fresh water, then in moist and marshy soil, to reach a higher stage on dry lands. The beginning was the cell, which originated in sea-water, an aquatic medium; the climax was man, a product eminently aërian. M. G. de Mortillet, while he recognized the ingenuity and attractiveness of M. Fauvelle's system, suggested that, to put it on a solid base, it would be necessary to prove that sea salt existed at the time of the origin of life.

a paper at the British Association on the worship of meteorites, Prof. H. A. Newton gave accounts of divine honors having been paid to meteoric stones in early times, and of myths and traditions pointing to such worship. Particular attention was directed to the indications of this cult that are found in Grecian and Roman history and literature.