Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/288

276 work was carried on on the two lines of the identification and correlation of geological formations by the organic remains contained in them, and of the study, from a biological point of view, of the faunas and floras contained in the rock for the purpose of obtaining a critical knowledge of the genera and species, and of the evolution of life and its relations to the environment during geological time. In the division of chemistry and physics a series of valuable measures of earth temperatures was obtained in a dry well four thousand five hundred feet deep at Wheeling, W. Va. Accompanying the report are papers on the Origin and Nature of Soils, by Prof. Shaler; the Lafayette Formation (or the Atlantic Coastal Plain), by W J McGee; the North American Continent during Cambrian Time, by C. D. Walcott; and the Eruptive Rocks of Electric Peak and Sepulchre Mountain, Yellowstone National Park, by J. P. Iddings.

The irrigation survey embraces two divisions of primary importance, and a third, of more immediate apparent utility, dependent upon them. First is the systematic mapping of the arid regions; the second division consists of measurements of the amount of water flowing in the most important streams and computations of the quantity available each day of the year, either for immediate irrigation or for storage purposes; and the third division consists of engineering examinations of such localities as the knowledge of the topography and of the water supply seemed to indicate as favorable for great irrigation development 3. The results of the third year's work of the survey, except the topographical maps which are issued from time to time, are shown in this report, which gives a description of 147 reservoir sites surveyed and reported for segregation, with the hydrographical data, fully illustrated by diagrams. The report is accompanied by a description, by Mr. Herbert M. Wilson, of the irrigation works of India as a practical example of irrigation engineering. The total area of land segregated for the 147 reservoirs—33 in California, 46 in Colorado, 27 in Montana, 39 in New Mexico, and 2 in Nevada—is 165,932 acres, which will afford a water surface, should all the reservoirs be filled to the height designated in the segregations, of 108,350 acres, and would be capable of supplying about a million and a half acres of cultivated land. A caution is given to the effect that the oscillations of water supply from year to year are so great that measurements made in any one year must be looked upon with distrust if large interests are at stake.

the several races of man have spread they have carried their respective languages, so that discoveries concerning the distribution of peoples throw light upon the history of language and vice versa. Hence there is much advantage in considering race and language together as is done in this book. The author finds in the history of language abundant traces of evolution, starting from inarticulate cries and passing through the syllabic, agglutinative, and inflected stages to the highest stage—the analytic. Certain languages have stopped on the lower planes of development and the people who speak them are, for the most part, those who have not gone forward in civilization nor spread out from their early homes over other lands. Thus, while inflected languages, and especially the Indo-European family, have been widely diffused, the agglutinative tongues have retreated to the borders of the civilized world. Taking up each class of languages in turn, the author passes in review the monosyllabic group of the extreme East, the agglutinative idioms of Central and Southern Asia, the Malayo-Polynesian and the African languages, telling something about the peoples by whom each is employed. The literature, rudimentary in several cases, of each group is also described. Thus we learn that the genius of the Malay is less suited to moral treatises than to tales and legendary histories. The most original contribution of the people of the Sunda Islands to literature is their popular poetry, and their kinsmen, the Polynesians, share their gift of poetical improvisation. After the African a class of agglutinative languages which the author calls polysynthetic is discussed. This class includes Basque and Eskimo, Algonkin and Iroquois, Nahuatl and Ketchua.