Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/686

664 square miles in the West where the wind has covered the land with monuments of its undisputed reign, the ever-changing sand hills, very little is known as to the quantity of the work performed by the wind in such regions, or as to the relation between this work and prevailing wind velocities. It is evident, also, that a considerable quantity of fine déhris is removed by the wind in such places, but observations are wanting as to what becomes of this product of trituration after it is raised from the creeping sand, how far it is carried, or where it is deposited. The atmosphere is known to carry appreciable quantities of dust, as already stated, even in low winds, but on this work the study of the dust storms and sand storms has no bearing. The study of the geological work of the atmosphere evidently requires a wider basis of facts.



E delight to glorify the "new woman," the advanced woman. If, however, we study Prof. Otis T. Mason's book. Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, we find the "new woman" to be only a revival of a very ancient type. Prof. Mason says that, for the highest ideals of civilization, in humanitarianism, education, and government, the way was prepared in savagery by mothers and the female clan groups. While men were the inventors of every murderous art, women were the actual inventors of the peaceful arts, and excelled in weaving, pottery, agriculture, the preparation of foods, and the substitution of other forces to do the work of the human muscles. Woman made rough looms. She tamed the present domestic animals. The first empirical physicians were not the sorcerers but the herb women, who collected also the earliest materia medica. Savage woman founded all the modern crafts. She was the butcher, the cook and server, the skin curer and dresser, the furrier, tailor, carver, cobbler, the hat and dress maker. She it was who made possible the great modern textile industries. In weaving, dyeing, embroidery, molding, modeling, and painting, in the origination first of geometric patterns and then of free-hand drawing, primitive women elaborated aesthetic art. They were also the earliest linguists, the founders of society as distinguished from savagery, the home-makers, and the patrons of religion.

Undeniably in those days woman was emancipated. In ancient civilizations her industrial skill was astonishing, as among the Egyptians, where, too, her legal and political rights were carefully guarded. But as clan groups made way for larger political 