Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/47

Rh the most part unavailing, and created intense bitterness wherever they have been made.

The question of the origin and ethnography of the Papuans presents almost insuperable difficulties, and has not yet been satisfactorily solved, although it seems probable that the numerous tribes, notwithstanding their striking physical divergencies, are merely varieties of a general type and offshoots of a common stock. Whether they form an isolated and independent branch of the human family, or are akin to the dolichocephalous, dark-skinned, crisp-haired races of Africa and the islands of the Pacific Ocean, as Huxley suggests, is undetermined and perhaps indeterminable.



HE meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Toronto in August last, was an occasion of peculiar interest in many ways. The first visit of the association to America, thirteen years ago—the Montreal meeting of 1884—proved so successful and interesting that the invitation from Toronto, urgently pressed upon the body two years since, found a ready response, and has resulted in this important gathering. Our own association, meeting in Detroit during the previous week, had arranged the time and the place with reference to the other; and a large proportion of the American members, including most of those prominent in our association, came to Toronto and took a more or less active part.

The American members, indeed, were no strangers to Toronto, their experience when meeting in that city in 1889 having left a profound impression of the culture and the hospitality of that beautiful university town; so that all who had been there then were glad to revisit the place and renew their pleasing associations. Hence it came to pass that the recent meeting assumed an almost international character. Of the more than thirteen hundred people who attended, it is estimated that in a general way about one third were British members, one third Canadians, and one third from "the States."

Such meetings as this are good in every way. They bring together in bonds of common interest people widely separated by residence, by nationality, and by feeling; and they can not fail to help in the great object which all lovers of science and of humanity are