Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 41.djvu/296

284 practice of industrial art improve their social status. Little by little the heads of business houses have drawn into their locality a large number of families from the rural districts, and in the mountains, at one thousand metres altitude, and on the plains where only the abundant pasturage affords a means of livelihood for the native, towns have risen rapidly for instance, Chaux de Fonds, Locle, and Saint-Imier. Thus, the system of collective industry, with work at the domestic hearth, has formed several generations of watch-makers. But, for thirty years, competition, and particularly American competition, has necessitated the erection of works with mechanical appliances.

The Sources of Gutta Percha.—Of the various kinds of gutta-percha, only those produced by trees of the old genus Isonandra, now sunk in Dichopsis, are available for use as insulators of cables. Their natural habitat is exclusively in the Malayan region. The destruction of this zone of forests proceeds rapidly. The natives cut every available tree, and repeat the process as fast as the plants spring up again. The scanty plantations started in the East Indies are, moreover, not formed of the best species, but of those which yield an inferior product. The best species has, in fact, become excessively rare, but is still in existence. Its adult representatives were yet propagating themselves in 1887 at the Chasserian estate in the ravines of the ancient forest of Boukett Tinah, in the center of Singapore. When M. Sèrullas, of Paris, found the spot in 1887, gutta-collecting had ceased for thirty years.

The Kanjntis.—The Kanjutis, of Hunza, the robber tribe of the Pamir table-land, inhabit the deeply cut valley which runs from the apex of central Asia, where the Hindu-Kush and Himalaya systems meet, and the water-shed between eastern and western Asia joins that between northern and southern Asia. Captain Younghusband found them to be small, well-built, hardy, determined, though not fierce-looking men, wearing long black curls, which gave them a very wild appearance. Perhaps the most remarkable feature about them is their capacity for endurance. "They issue from their strongholds on their raiding expeditions, and cover often two hundred miles of mountainous and uninhabited country, entirely on foot, and carry their own supplies for the whole distance on their backs; and I have known cases of men carrying news of my movements to their chief in an incredibly short time. Dressed in long cloaks of thick, homemade woolen material, they sleep out in the open in the most intense cold, and yet live upon almost nothing. They are also very avaricious, although they know and care little for money; but they covet goods greedily."

A Stronghold of Birds.—The Bird Rocks, or Three Islands of Birds, near Newfoundland, were so resorted to by gannets in Audubon's time that their tops seemed covered with snow. The birds were then much used for bait, and Audubon's captain told him that his boat's crew had once killed six hundred and forty of them in an hour, with no better weapons than sticks. Up to 1860 they covered the tops of the rocks and many of the ledges on the sides. The erection of a lighthouse on the Great Rock, in 1870, was followed by a rapid decrease in numbers. In 1881 Mr. Brewster found the birds on the Great Rock confined to the ledges along the sides, while the Little Rock was still densely populated. In 1887 not a gannet was raised on the Little Rock, although a few were breeding on the pillar of rock adjacent to it. The murres, razor-bills, and puffins, Mr. Frederick A. Lucas believes, have probably suffered somewhat less than their more conspicuous comrades, although even among them the decrease must have been very great. Still, their smaller size, and consequent ability to breed in crevices of the rocks and on ledges too narrow to accommodate a bulky gannet, has been of great service to them; while the razor-bill also seems to be learning by experience the desirability of putting an egg out of sight whenever practicable. The puffins find safety in their burrowing habits, and breed extensively in the decomposed sandstone at the northeastern portion of the Great Rock, as well as under the overhanging inaccessible ledges of the northern side of the Little Rock. The little rocky pillar already mentioned is well occupied by birds of various species, and, owing to the difficulty of scaling the rock, the little colony is fairly secure. But, from its size,