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1912.]

yearly increase, provides a good income for the future. Well-trained sled-deer have been used to carry the United States mail from to, a distance of six hundred and fifty miles. This is the most northern mail-route in this country, and the most perilous and desolate mail-trip in the world. The average speed is from forty to fifty miles per day.

At Barrow, “the jumping-off place” of the American continent, there is a herd of more than seven hundred deer. Here about one hundred and twenty Eskimo boys and girls attend the Government school. They are the most northern school children in the world. Some of the boys get up at three or four o'clock in the morning and walk five miles to the open water to capture a seal for their mother, but they always get back in time for school at nine o’clock. Occasionally the young people ride reindeer for amusement, but it is not a customary method of travel in Alaska, as it is in Siberia.

early times, certain trees were invested by human beings with a mystic or a sacred character, and many plants were associated with religious beliefs. One of the best examples of the last is the. When the early Spanish settlers in South America saw this flower, they fancied that they had discovered a marvelous symbol of the crucifixion, and they devoutly believed that it was an assurance of the ultimate triumph of Christianity. One of their writers,, according to “The Folk-Lore of Plants,” obtained detailed knowledge of how the Mexicans regarded it, and gave a minute description of the blossom.

The ten colored petals and sepals represent the ten apostles present at the crucifixion (Peter and Judas being absent).

Inside the corolla is a showy crown of filaments, by some taken to represent the crown of thorns, by others the halo.

It is interesting, in the study of plant life, to note the extent to which various peoples have assigned to plants qualities and meanings that existed only in their own ideas or beliefs. Some of these have been beneficial, as, for example, the idea that a tree has a soul, and for that reason should not be cut down, lest one should hear “the wailing of the trees when they suffer in this way.” It might be a good thing if certain people, nowadays, had such beliefs as would lead them to treat considerately not only trees and plants, but birds and four-footed animals as well.