Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/658

 ceremonials are founded seem to be reversed. Professional merrymen are proverbially grave and melancholy in private life, while undertakers, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes, are cheery beyond their fellows. The assumption, therefore, of devotional attitudes, and of a pious countenance, in the hope that the soul may follow suit, may not be so safe as has been generally supposed.

Even if space permitted, it would be impossible on the present occasion to analyze each of the many distinct trade expressions which must be familiar to all dwellers in towns. In the first place, our knowledge of the inner lives of most persons outside our own class or social circle is quite insufficient to justify us in theorizing concerning the forces which may have been instrumental in making them, facially, what they are. Until some enthusiastic naturalist will apply the methods of Lubbock and Huber to his fellow-men, we must be content to remain in comparative ignorance. But if the general principles which I have ventured to put forward in this paper are to be trusted, any new fact concerning the habits of any section of the great human swarm may at once be made available by those who are endeavoring to place physiognomy on a sound basis.—Blackwood's Magazine.



HE efficiency of the clouds in lifting water will be brought home to us if we consider the rainfall over a garden fifty feet wide and one hundred feet in length. If one hundredth of an inch of rain occurs, about twenty-five gallons or two hundred and fifty pounds of water will have fallen. One inch of rain over the garden would mean twenty-five thousand pounds of water.

A rainfall of forty-five inches in a year is not an unusually large rainfall. New York city has a mean annual rainfall of 45·2 inches, the observations covering a period of twenty-two years. If this rain of a year fell in equal amounts each day, we would have for every acre of surface two thousand eight hundred gallons of water, or in avoirdupois nearly nine thousand tons of water to the square mile. Tipping Manhattan Island each evening and draining it would give two hundred thousand tons of water. In a year over seventy million tons of water are dropped on the roofs, sheds, and pavements of Manhattan Island.

It requires a powerful pump to lift water in such quantities and store it in reservoirs thousands of feet above us. And these reservoirs are remarkable; for they have no walls of rigid 