Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/147

Rh reposing for the last fifteen months, was followed by the ceremonies at the crypt. M. J. B. Pasteur said to the council of the institute, in behalf of the family, "I intrust to you this tomb which we have raised to our father in this institute which he loved so dearly." Addresses were delivered by M. Rambaud, Minister of Education, and M. Baudin, President of the Municipality, and an address by M. Legouvé was read by M. Gaston Boissier.

Bachelor Seals.—The young male seals, commonly called "bachelors," are very much like the females in size and color. During the breeding season they are not permitted by the bulls to enter the rookeries, hence they herd together separately on the so-called "hauling grounds." Unlike their seniors, who in the "harems" are busy founding families, these young bachelors have no fixed place of abode, but range at will over a large area of ground, usually sand beaches near the rookeries. Known also as "killable" seals, they are driven from their haunts and killed with clubs at about three years of age, the time when their fur is at its best. Small four-year-olds and large two-year-olds, being about the same size as the bachelors, are also hunted. Among these herds may sometimes be found bulls from four to six years old, who, being too cowardly to assert themselves in the harems, are forced to keep company with these youngsters. Another mode of hunting them is called "pelagic sealing," which means killing them in the open sea with firearms, or with the spear and club. In order to digest their food, they lie sleeping on the surface of the water, and the hunter finds it easy enough to steal up in his boat and spear the defenseless animal. This is really wholesale slaughter, for the hunter indiscriminately kills whatever lies in his way, even the nursing mothers, thus leaving the pups to die of starvation.

Nationality and Scenery.—In the introduction to an article in the Deutsche Rundschau descriptive of the German landscape, Herr Friedrich Ratzel shows by a few well-directed allusions how the intrinsic character of the scenery of a region, even in its apparently most natural features, is affected by the nationality that occupies it, and reflects the character of that nationality. The allusions are local, but the principle they illustrate is general. A country with such a history as Germany's can have no purely natural landscape. The people and their land are the resultant of a long material development. When the Romans knew Germany—a barbarian region with few inhabitants—the works of man were less in evidence, and Nature prevailed. The effects of cultivation have worked in two principal directions: First, the woods are cleared up, the water is confined within limits, the habitations of men are multiplied and enlarged and made more durable, and new plants and animals are brought in. Then uncontemplated changes step in, which proceed of themselves from the works of cultivation. With the drying of the soil the climate is modified. The introduction of new plants and animals imposes new features upon the conditions of life. Where before only stretches of heath, moor, and swamp formed natural openings in the predominant forest, extensive woodless regions arise through the labors of man, from which the shade-loving plants and animals that were protected by the forest gloom disappear, and other inhabitants are at home in the cultivated fields. The variations in the particular shaping of these changes are more especially marked where the boundaries run through mountain regions. In the Saxon Erzgebirge the forests have lost all their wildness, and plantations of firs and oaks grow in regular order, all nearly of a height, with no trees towering into prominence, and the mountain has the trimmed and symmetrical appearance of a nursery. The brooks are tamed, dammed, and made to earn their right to be as the servants of the mills. Passing over the mountains and going down the Bohemian side, we are in the woods again, with the valleys free and irregular, and the brooks running according to their own will. The contrast is seen again, but less marked, in going up from Bohemia and down into Bavaria. Within Germany itself the garden-tilled plots near the industrial centers and the little rectangular holdings of the southwestern and middle districts, each distinctly marked off from its neighbor, and making the whole look like a party-colored