Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 48.djvu/797

Rh northern coast. It is called the region of treeless swamp, is uninhabited, and for eight months out of the twelve is covered with snow. Yet he found this to be the unknown land which drains the Old World of half its bird population every spring. At the beginning of April Mr. Seebohm reached Ust Zylma, three hundred miles from the mouth of the Petchora. The surface of the river was frozen as far as the eye could reach, and the frozen forest was as bare of life as the Desert of Sahara. Suddenly summer came, and with it the birds arrived. The ice on the river split and disappeared, the banks steamed in the sun, and innumerable birds of all sizes and colors appeared within forty-eight hours after the first warmth. The tundra was found to be a moor, with here and there a large, flat bog and numerous lakes. It was covered with moss, lichens, heathlike plants, dwarf birch, and millions of acres of cloudberries, cranberries, and crowberries. Forced by the perpetual sunshine of the arctic summer, these latter bear enormous crops of fruit. But the crop is not ripe until the middle or end of the arctic summer, and if the fruit-eating birds had to wait until it was ripe they would starve. But each year the snow descends on this immense crop of ripe fruit before the birds have time to gather it. It is perfectly preserved by, this natural system of cold storage until the next spring, when the melting of the snow discloses the bushes with the unconsumed last year's crop hanging on them or lying ready to be eaten on the ground. It never decays, and is accessible the moment the snow melts. The same heats which free the fruits bring into being the most prolific insect life in the world. No European can live there without a veil after the snow melts. Thus the insect-eating biids are provided for. The trip to the Petchora was but one of many similar expeditions which Mr. Seebohm undertook from a pure love of and interest in his science.

The Negro Problem.—Mr. J. L. M. Curry, Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, has written an interesting pamphlet on The Negro Problem in the South, in which, among other things, he discusses the -influence of education on the negro since the war. He says in substance: More than a generation has passed since slavery ceased in the United States. Despite some formidable obstacles, the negroes have been favored beyond any other race known in the history of mankind. Freedom, citizenship, suffrage, civil and political rights, educational opportunities and religious privileges, every method and function of civilization have been secured and fostered by Federal and State governments, ecclesiastical organizations, munificent individual benefactions, and yet the results have not been on the whole such as to inspire most sanguine expectations or justify conclusions of rapid development or of racial equality. Much of the aid lavished upon the negro has been misapplied charity, and, like much other alms-giving, hurtful to the recipient. Schools which were established without any serious need of them have been helped; public-school systems, upon which the great mass of children, white and colored, must rely for their education, have been underrated and injured, and schools of real merit and doing good work, which deserve confidence and contributions, have had assistance legitimately their due diverted into improper channels. A very promising sign, however, is the long-wished-for industrial development which seems to be dawning on the South. Whatever may be our speculative opinions as to the progress and development of which the negro may be ultimately capable, there can hardly be a well-grounded opposition to the opinion that the hope for the race in the South is to be found not so much in the high courses of university instruction or in schools of technology as in handicraft instruction. This instruction, by whatever name called, encourages us in its results to continued and liberal effort. What such schools as Hampton, the Spelman, Claflin, Tuskegee, Tongaloo, and others have done is the demonstration of the feasibility and the value of industrial and manual training. The general instruction heretofore given in the schools, it is feared, has been too exclusively intellectual, too little of that kind which produces intelligent and skilled workmen, and therefore not thoroughly adapted to racial development nor to fitting for the practical duties of life. That the two diverse races now in the South can ever permanently harmonize while occupying the same territory, no one competent to form an opinion believes. That the presence in the same