Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/554

538 given, that the comparatively equal head growth of all known men is no evidence whatever against the theory of their evolutionary descent, while the closely related fact that man shares with certain lower species of animals built like himself a brain development peculiar to him and them, and which has succeeded to an arrested head growth in his and their case alike, is more than an indication, it is very good proof so far as it goes that he and they had a similar if not the same origin and are members of the same family. And it is also evident, in the case of man at least, that this convolutional brain development is continuous from the lowest savages up to the age of machinery and the extreme division of labor, the accompanying institution of voluntary benevolent associations, and the modern forms of parental government, when it thus meets for the first time with a threatened reversal in the case of the routine laborer. He finds himself as a result of these changes in this predicament, he is still in possession, by inheritance, of the full brain development of the civilized, but with less use for, or need of it than has the hunting savage of the neolithic period.

In taking leave of this subject, one question not quite pertinent to the issue can not be repressed. Since all civilizations thus far have encountered a brood of incidental evils peculiarly their own, and, if not of their own creation, still consequent upon them, who can say that the one just exposed may not be the primal cause of the world-wide unrest of the present laboring classes, finding expression in all sorts of disorder from strikes to anarchy—the first fruits of atrophy—the vain attempt to employ an otherwise idle and already degenerating organ of thought, and, like all readjustments to a lower plane, resulting in vicious and reactionary conduct? If this result had been foreseen, could the cause have been suppressed? Is social growth, to any greater extent than individual, modified by desire and volition?

the temperature of the surface of the huge extents of water of the oceans, Captain W. J. L. Wharton observes, the climates of the different parts of the world largely depend. Areas where great differences of surface temperature prevail are those in which storms are generated. In the region south of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland many of the storms which travel over the Atlantic have their rise. Hero the variations are excessive, not only from the juxtaposition of the warm water of the Gulf Stream and the cold water of the arctic current flowing southward inside of it, but in the Gulf Stream itself, which is composed of streaks of warm and colder water, between which differences of as much as 20º Fahr. exist. The same conditions exist south of the Cape of Good Hope, another well-known birthplace of storms. Here the Agulhas current of about 70º Fahr., diverted by the land, pours into the mass of water to the northward, colder by some 25º, and the meeting place is known as being most tempestuous.