Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/440

428 could buy tobacco and various useful little things. Newcomers were confidentially exhorted and admonished on Sunday afternoons by the pastor. Forty-nine men were in the colony during Mr. Flynt's stay. In winter there are more than three hundred. The colonies are believed to be useful in distinguishing the deserving unemployed from the undeserving, and helpful to the former.

Diffusion of an Ancient Symbol.—The swastika—a design resembling two Z's, normal or reversed, so arranged as to cross one another—is described and studied as "the earliest known symbol" in a paper by Thomas Wilson in the Proceedings of the United States National Museum. It appears in various shapes, derived from the original, and is the parent of various scroll forms and ornaments. Its origin and original bearing or application are lost in the darkness of remote antiquity. It denotes something good, and is an ornament. It is found in the far East and the classical East, in all the cities of Troy, in Egypt, Algeria, and Ashantee, in the ancient Grecian countries, in western Europe from the bronze age down, on ancient coins, in prehistoric America, and among the North American Indians. Allied to it are meanders, ogees, and spirals; and associated with it are various prehistoric objects in both hemispheres. In America, the swastika of the mound builders, or of the oldest civilization we know here, is similar in every respect, except material, to that of the still living Navajo and Pueblo Indians. The two curious facts are emphasized that the swastika had an existence in America prior to any historic knowledge we have of communication between the two hemispheres; and that it is continued in America, and used at the present day, while the knowledge of it has long since died out in Europe. Mr. Wilson's chief study is to find how this symbol was carried from one region to another. While the theory that like features of life originate naturally at like stages in the development of different peoples, and the one that they are carried by migrating hordes, may both be true to a certain extent, neither should be insisted upon as exclusive. Mr. Wilson maintains that the swastika was carried, as some other customs may have been, by teaching, or by the transmission of the idea from one country to another—much in the same way as Greek art and architecture have come down to us—rather than by independent invention or by migration of peoples.

Richard Hakluyt.—The Hakluyt Society has recently celebrated in London the fiftieth anniversary of its work in publishing volumes, usually containing the texts of travelers and voyagers in all parts of the world, which were previously not known to the public. It is named. Sir Clements Markham says, after Richard Hakluyt, who was born in 1553, acquired a love of geography from an uncle of the same name, and assiduously sought and read every narrative of adventure he could procure, mastering six foreign languages in order to be able to do so. He strove to remedy the ignorance of seamen of the scientific branch of their profession, and to supply the absence of records for want of which important voyages and travels were allowed to-fall into oblivion, with a measure of success that has given him rank among the benefactors of their country. He was irrepressible in seeking new information. He rode two hundred miles to have an interview with the last survivor of Master Hose's Expedition to America in 1536. He saved numerous journals and narratives from destruction, and the deeds they record from oblivion. His work gave a stimulus to colonial and narrative enterprise, and inspired literature. Shakespeare owed much to Principal Navigators, his chief book. As the years passed on, he, according to his own quaint language, continued "to wade still further and further in the sweat studie of the historic of cosmographie," and achieved his great task, which was "to incorporate into one body the torn and scattered limbs of our ancient and late navigations by sea." He declared "geography and chronology to be the sun and moon, the right eye and the left, of all history." When he died, November 23, 1616, he was Archdeacon of Westminster, and had reached his sixty-fourth year.

Primitive Traveling.—Of the motives and lengths of the journeys of primitive man Mr. O. T. Mason observes, in his monograph on Primitive Travel and Transportation, that birds of passage made formerly longer