Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/878

860 athletes superseded the prizes of intrinsic value offered in heroic times. Wreaths of laurel, myrtle, vine leaves, or flowers, were commonly worn at symposia, and are thus represented on vases. A few such wreaths have been found preserved in Egypt. The manufacture of garlands is depicted in several Pompeiian pictures. Gold crowns were frequently modeled in the form of leaves. Other materials for wreaths were wool and artificial leaves and flowers of horn or silk. Much may be learned about wreaths in the writings of Theophrastus, Plutarch, Pliny, Atheuæus, and Gellius, and from inscriptions.

Scenery of Spitzbergen.—Sir William M. Conway and his companions found Spitzbergen, of which they were the first explorers, a very different country from what it was supposed to be. The general impression was that a continuous ice cap would be found, and they expected it; but "in place of a frozen surface they met with crevassed sloppy glaciers, surrounded by miles of quaking bogs and innumerable watercourses"—a perpetual thaw produced by the perpetual day of a brief arctic summer, in a region emerging, as it were, from a glacial epoch. Of course, the opposite conditions of relentless ice prevail in winter. Why should men be attracted to such countries, as arctic explorers who have gone once seem to be time and again? Sir William gives one of the reasons. "The arctic glory," he says, "is a thing apart, wilder, rarer, and no less superb than the glory of any other region of this beautiful world. Here man has no place, and there is no sign of his handiwork. Nature completes her own intentions unhelped and unhindered by him. Such pure snows no Alpine height presents, nor such pale blue skies, nor that marvelous, remote, opalescent sea with its white flocks and its yet more distant shores. No Alpine outlook penetrates through such atmosphere, so mellow, so rich." There are days, the reviewer of Sir William's book in the Athenæum adds—rare days—of glorious cloud effects, when faint mists, delicate and gray, brood on the fiords and almost obliterate the bases of the hills, leaving their tops to stand out clear against a sky mottled with brilliant flocks of cloudlets. The beauties of Spitzbergen are found not as in true mountain regions in the forms of the hills, but in the atmospheric colors and effects. The landscapes have the charm of breadth, of horizontal lines, rather than any sublimity or picturesqueness. "The whole country," says Sir William, "is interesting from a scientific point of view because of the rapidity with which its surface is being modeled into such forms as were impressed in glacial times on the more temperate and inhabited parts of northern Europe."

Dancing Ostriches.—The execution of a kind of waltz is described by Mr. S. C. Cronright Schreiner as a common practice among ostriches. When there are a number of them, they will start off in the morning and, after running a few hundred yards, will stop, and with raised wings will whirl rapidly round till they are stupefied, or perhaps break a leg. The males pose also before fighting and to make their court. They kneel on their ankles, opening their wings, and balancing themselves alternately forward and backward or to one side or the other, while the neck is stretched on a level with the back and the head strikes the sides, now on the right, now on the left, while the feathers are bristling. The bird appears at this time so absorbed in its occupation as to forget all that is going on around him, and can be approached and caught. The male alone utters a cry, which sounds much like an effort to speak with the mouth shut tight. The omnivorous qualities of the ostrich have hardly been exaggerated. It swallows oranges, small turtles, fowls, kittens, and bones. Mr. Schreiner tells of one swallowing also a box of peaches, tennis balls, several yards of fencing wire, and half a dozen cartridges. One followed the workmen and picked up the wire as they cut it. Most frequently the ostrich does not swallow each dainty separately, but collects several in its throat and then swallows them all at once. Sometimes it is strangled. Its windpipe is then cut, the obstacle taken out, and the wound sewed up, when all goes well again.

Gypsum in Kansas.—The gypsum deposits of Kansas are described by Mr. G. P. Grimsley in the Kansas University Quarterly as occurring in a belt that trends northeast-southwest across the State, two hundred and thirty miles long, while the bed of exposed