Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 45.djvu/854

832 comprehending it, without making the necessary deductions for it, and without including the important phenomenon in their calculations. Houzeau was mistaken in affirming that the Incas observed only one solstice. The historians are unanimous in describing a festival for each of them. We have seen, besides, that two systems of observatories existed, with towers and turrets in different positions, and consequently designed for the observation of two different solstices.

We need not, furthermore, presume that the people had no calendar, from the amantas observing the zenith passages of the sun every year. The day, hour, and minute of an eclipse are foretold now; yet astronomers are not prevented by this from studying the different phases of the phenomena.

The destruction of these observatories, which Garcilaso says were still standing in 1560, must be regretted. Those of Quito were destroyed by Sebastian Belalcazar, under pretext that they prompted the natives to idolatry. Only shapeless ruins of them are now to be found. The best preserved ones are at Cuzco, on the Carmenca hill. The question, long asked, whether the Incas used optical instruments, is now answered in the affirmative. Mr. David Forbes has brought from Peru a silver figurine, which represents a personage, probably an astronomer, holding to his eye a tube which is nothing else than a telescope. The figure is certainly of Peruvian origin, and dates from the period of the Incas.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

taking the recent census of India some difficulty was experienced, according to C. E. D. Black, in determining what should be regarded as a house. "The variety of structure was so great that a precise definition, such as satisfied census authorities in other parts of the world, became an impossibility in India. In the hill tracts one meets with collections of leaf-huts that are here to-day and gone to-morrow. Again, there is a portable arrangement of matting and bamboo that is slung on a donkey by the vagrant classes, though sometimes stationary on the outskirts of a village for months together. Then comes the more stable erection for the cultivator while engaged in watching his crops, and so on to the really permanent abode of the lower grades of village menials, with wattle and daub walls which last for years, and a roofing of thatch or palmyra leaves, renewed as necessary before each rainy season. In some parts of India a considerable space is walled in with a thick hedge of thorn or rattan, and the family expands in separate buildings as the sons marry, but all is considered to be a single 'house.' Pitched roofs, tiled or thatched, are usual in the moister tracts; flat-topped mud or brick buildings are almost universal in the dry plains of the Deccan and Upper India. Climate and the scarcity or plentifulness, as the case may be, are the main causes of the diversity of building; while social custom and the relative prevalence of the 'joint' or 'divided' family life among the Brahmanic classes often determine the interior construction and arrangement."