Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/92

 Spanish influence was ever felt there. It is found also in sections where the Spaniard did not remain long enough to permanently inject his term agua, or augua, into the dialects of the aborigines. Indeed, no native tribes or peoples have been known on the continent who have readily adopted the tongue or even the general terms of a foreign race. Even the modern Indians have persistently rejected the tongue of the European.

And yet we have such South and Central American names as the following—titles that are regarded as native or aboriginal—in the modern writings: Ur-augua, Par-augua, Agua-pi, Nicaragua, Conch-augua, Des-augua-dero; these and many more showing the same term that is conspicuous in our native Indian appellations, written Wat-auga, Chicam-auga, Canadian-augua, Nottas-augua, Aut-augua, and the like, in North America words that are quite universally regarded as pure aboriginal names, the main term entirely free from the influences of the Caucasian tongue.



HE Material View of Life and its Relations to the Spiritual, by Prof. Graham Lusk, Assistant Professor of Physiology, Yale Medical School, in The Popular Science Monthly for August, 1893, presents to the mind of a layman a unique combination of facts and fancies, of scientific deductions and metaphysical assumptions. The professor's "material view" in the main finds adequate support in the domain of demonstrable knowledge, but his "reasoning" process in support of his spiritual view is distributed over a good deal of imaginative and unknown territory. The professor observes: "Matter is divided into ponderable and imponderable—ponderable, that which can be weighed; imponderable, that which can not be weighed." Some proof is certainly required in support of this statement. The conventional terms of speech employed in treating of matter admit of a division of matter within certain limitations, to more clearly establish the differences in material forms; but to boldly imply that a portion of the matter in existence has no weight—is imponderable—is to challenge the presentation of clearly defined evidence. The professor may be right, he may be wrong. He may believe he is right, yet belief in the absence of knowledge is mere belief, and one belief in the abstract is of about as much importance as any other belief, however ridiculous. Moreover, to assume to establish the existence of an "ether" as a means of explaining "something otherwise inexplicable," is a process of reasoning which 