Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/735

Rh accepted as final by all subsequent conventions. In 1881-’82, 81 per cent of the 280 schools for the deaf on the Continent of Europe were pure oral schools, 4 per cent were sign schools, and 15 per cent pursued a combined system. Prof. Bell traces the origin of his invention of the telephone to his observation of the ability of the pupils in the Horace Mann School to understand what was said to them by reading the movements of the lips. He was finally convinced of the fact, and was led to study the subject; then to devise machines and contrivances to help the children, the ultimate outcome of which was the telephone.

"Geological Myths."—As "geological myths," Prof. B. K. Emerson, in his chairman's address before the Geological Section of the American Association, characterized "the Chimæra, or the poetry of Petroleum; the Niobe, or the tragic side of calcareous tufa; Lot's wife, or the indirect religious effects of cliff erosion; and Noah's flood, or the possibilities of the cyclone and the earthquake wave working in harmony." Regarding a myth as meaning "a history, treasured and hallowed in the literary and religious archives of an ancient folk, of some startling or impressive event that, in the stimulating environment of poetry and personification, has completed a long evolution which disguises entirely its original," the author sought the origin of these stories in traits of the natural features with which they were associated. The Chimæra was described by the Greek poets as a monster having the tail of a dragon, the body of a goat, and the head of a lion, or the three heads of lion, goat, and serpent, vomiting fire and ravaging the mountains of Lycia. By comparing the references in various authors with the observations of Admiral Beaufort at the end of the last century, the examination of the spot by Spratt and Forbes in 1842, and the accounts of other modern travelers, the origin of the fable is traced to a mountain called the Yanar-dagh, formerly Chimæra (both names meaning burning mountain), from a crevice of which issues a stream of burning gas. The Greek word χαμασίρα means goat. Hence the origin of the basis of the myth, the goat's body, to which, it really vomiting flames, imagination added the heads and the tail. Niobe, who wept herself into a stone over the death of her twelve children slain and petrified, is, as the American scholar Van Lennep has shown, a prehistoric statue of a woman, cut in the rock of Mount Sipylus, in Lydia, over which the water trickles from the rocks above. Below the figure lie in the talus rocks fallen from the cliffs, out of which imagination may construct the children turned to stone. The name Niobe is associated in sound with Greek words signifying the pouring of water and the falling of snow. Lot's wife is representative of a common phenomenon of the salt ridge of Kushum Usdum, or Sodom, on the Dead Sea, where one pillar is formed out of the mass as its predecessor is eaten away. The story of the Flood may well stand as a graphic description of the combined action of a cyclone and an earthquake with tidal wave, affecting the region of the Persian Gulf.

The Circulation in Plants.—The discussion in the Botanical Section of the British Association on the circulation of water in plants was participated in by Francis Darwin, Prof. Marshall Ward, Prof. Fitzgerald, and Dr. Joly, of Dublin. Mr. Darwin considered the path of the ascending current in trees and the force that produces the ascent of the water. Attention was called to the necessity of a complete study of the minute structure of wood in relation to the modern theories. Prof. Vines referred to an account he had published of a number of experiments on the suction force of branches. He had been under the impression that the results obtained were independent of the action of atmospheric pressure—that they were solely indications of tensile stress exerted by the transpiring branch upon the water in the apparatus; but now he had reason to believe that they were, as a matter of fact, affected by the atmospheric pressure. Hence these results are not different in kind from those of other observers, but are compatible with them. The observations brought out the two important facts that a high suction force can be developed by branches which have been deprived of their leaves, and that this suction force is not dependent on the life of the branch. Prof. Vines then proceeded to give an