Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/150

140 activity: the negro battles; the dreamy, still life of the South Sea islanders; the buffalo hunters; Yakuts so hardened as to sleep almost naked in the snow; India-rubber collectors on the Amazons; Patagonian giants; Niam Niam dwarfs, etc." The author especially commends the polar regions as artistically attractive, where great effects are produced with little color by the varying charms of light conferring life upon even the most monotonous views. In the four years and a half he spent there he was ever charmed by the change in pictures of Nature. "What a magic spell, for instance, is produced even by the twilight. . . . the time without bright light, almost without shade; that of soft, dreamy silhouettes, of the clear green sky, and the pale, silvery tone of the mountains! The snow is now melted, and the blue sea-ice lies bare, scarcely tinged with red by the setting sun. Even the long winter night possesses its artistic charm from the midday arch of light, or the moon, which changes the channels beneath into rivers of silver. The arctic sky alone would enrapture the painter. As the returning sun nears the horizon, every color glows forth, a border of light dividing the part of the atmosphere still in the shadow of the earth from that already lighted up." Then there are the infinitely varied phenomena of refraction, with Fata Morgana, giving the most curiously odd and unlike appearances to various objects; vapor effects; the ice blink; variations of snow and bare ground; pastures with reindeer and musk oxen; and vegetation, for, "although there is never the thick flora of our meadows, yet one meets with limited areas either yellow with Papava nudicaule or Ranunculus, or carmine with Silene or Saxifraga, or blue with forget-me-not, or white with Crastium. East Greenland has its huge Kaiser Franz Josef fiord, surpassing the fiord of Norway, and the whole of Greenland furnishes surpassing mountain landscapes; Spitzbergen has a profile like a saw; and Novaya Zemlya is a table land, buttressed by mountain cones."

Forest Protection in the United States.—In a paper published in the Proceedings of the American Forestry Association, Mr. George H. Parsons, of Colorado Springs, shows that measures for the protection of forests were taken by some of the colonies as early as in the seventeenth century. These provisions were continued everywhere after the formal organization of the Government of the United States, and now each State and Territory has some law, providing more or less severe punishment to any person setting fire to woodland or prairie. But as it is very difficult to find the offender, or to convict him afterward, laws of this class are operative, if at all, by their threat rather than by their execution, and with few exceptions have become dead letters. The only States said to be comparatively free from forest fires are Maine and Massachusetts, and especially New York, whose forest commissioner reports that they are now a thing of the past. Laws encouraging the planting and growing of timber and shade trees are found on the statutes of twenty-two States and Territories, having been adopted more generally in the prairie States. They have been the means of covering with trees thousands of acres, and have driven the prairies many miles westward. Kansas is credited with the largest area planted with forest trees, and Nebraska comes next. These laws have done much good, but, after all, tree-planting along roadsides, and in small, isolated clumps, is not forestry, and legislation of this kind, though indirectly aiding the cause in an educational way, does not preserve or create forests. In the same direction of education is the appointment of Arbor Day, which has become a legal holiday in thirty States and Territories. Being celebrated in the public schools, it is made a most important factor in creating an interest in trees and a knowledge of plant life among people at their most impressionable age. Regular forest commissioners or commissions have been appointed in ten States. They began work actively and enthusiastically, but it is now a question whether they are able to do much good. Politics is gnawing their vitals out.

A Volcanic Dust Deposit In Kansas.—A large deposit of volcanic dust is described in Science by H. J. Harney as existing in central Kansas, in McPherson County, north of the watershed between the Smoky Hill and Little Arkansas, and in the great depression extending from Salina to the Little Arkansas.