mals, many of which have bodies that far out-measure, out-weigh, and over-power his. If men should ever prove that the body of man is developed from that of some lower form of life, they would even then be far from proving a like origin for his spiritual nature; and till they have more marked success in demonstrating the former, there is little ground for fear that they will soon or ever establish the latter. Authorities differ widely as to what particular geological formations belong to the work of each creative day. As the plants of early geologic time were marine, and perhaps entirely submerged, it is reasonable to suppose they would not attract the notice of Moses, as the scenes were pictured before his mind's eye, with anything like the vividness of the vast forests of the Carboniferous Age which formed our coal beds thousands of square miles in extent and scores of feet in aggregate thickness. Prof. Dana estimates that "for a bed of pure anthracite thirty feet thick the bed of vegetation should have been at least 240 feet thick." If we compare this thickness with the depth of fallen and decaying vegetable matter on our oldest and densest timber-lands, we can easily imagine how much ranker must have been the vegetation of those primeval forests. If the luxuriance of this vegetable growth was what Moses referred to, the third creative day must correspond with our Carboniferous period. The excessive heat, the great amount of carbonic anhydride in the air, and the thick fogs and vapors which still concealed the Sun, were all favorable to this profuse and dense vegetation. The first and second days would then be represented by the Archæn, or oldest rocks formed, and the Silurian and Devonian Ages following. In these strata nearly all the remains of life we find are marine and would not impress the mind of an observer. During all these ages, too, the geologic record informs us there was but little land raised above the ocean, and this little was but slightly elevated and was barren of all life but the meanest vegetable forms. At best it would have presented but a most desolate and unattractive picture to an eyewitness. But in the Carboniferous Age the land was greatly extended, and the contrast it presented to the desolation of all previous time must have been peculiarly noteworthy. During the fourth day, while the atmosphere was being cleared of its mists and clouds so as to reveal the celestial luminaries, the submergence of this profuse vegetable deposit and its burial by the detritus of the sea under thick layers of clay and sand, such as we now find above the coal, might have been going on. Then, when the waters brought forth the swarm of monster "whales" and flying reptiles of the fifth day, would follow in geologic order the Reptilian Age which abounded in just such animals. Following these, the geologic record next discloses the crawling sloth of monstrous size and the other huge terrestrial mammals associated above with the flint implements of pre-historic man, which closely correspond with the creeping things, the cattle, and lastly man, of the sixth Mosaic day. ANTHROPOLOGY AND ARCHEOLOGY. NORTH AUSTRALIAN TRIBES. PROF. OTIS T. MASON. Mr. E. Palmer, after having enjoyed exceptional advantages of personal observation, contributes to the Anthropological Society, of London, a paper of great merit on nine Australian tribes, living chiefly on the streams emptying into Carpentană Gulf. Tribal boundaries are known and respected, but there is no individual right of land. When tribes met at a common festival, it was with the consent of the owning tribe; they never hesitate, however, to cross a neighbor's ground for war or blood revenge. The color of the skin varies from black to light brown. The women are healthy, their children precocious. Infanticide is less common than supposed, but abortion is frequently resorted to. The men are stoical and cruel, practice polygamy, and are skilled in deceit. Mr. Palmer enters minutely into their hunting, foods, weapons, arts, ornaments, graphic methods, amusements, beliefs, myths, ceremonies, burial, and healing art. That which will interest most highly the anthropologist is Mr. Palmer's studies in their class system. Mr. A. W. Howitt reviews his contributions, adding information from other sources so as to make the chain as complete as possible. It may not be known to all the readers of science that the Australian tribes are separated into classes, four, or some other number. The blacks are born into these divisions and they must not marry into their own class or eat the animal which represents it, indeed, they do not like to see any one else eat of their totem. A few specimens of these classes from the simplest to the more complex will illustrate the subject: In the Dieri Tribe it will be noticed that there are two classes, and that the children take the mother's name. Now Mr. Howitt thinks that all the tribes with four classes have each a still more fundamental division into two main classes, with father or mother right. This is substantially the plan lying at the foundation of our Indian clans. Observe now the Yerrunthuly Tribe. The children are named after their grandparents, that is, after mother's mother or father's father. This method is not found in North America. The Mycoolon Tribe exhibit a still greater differentiation. Here males and females have separate class titles. The boys are named after fathers' fathers, and the girls after their mothers' mothers. Bearing in mind Mr. Howitt's remark upon the two fundamental, generic classes, and observing whether the boys' or the girls' names are taken from the same fundamental class, we discover that among the Mycoolon the girl is of the same class name as her mother's mother. In the Kamilaroi system, with motherright, the son is of the same class as his father's father. In other words, says Mr. Howitt, in the Kamilaroi system descent is uterine; in the Mycoolon, it is agnatic. As Mr. Dorsey has shown us that, among our own Indians, the law requiring a youth to marry out of his clan has many addenda, pointing out whom the bride shall be; so among the Australians, it is not quite true that any Koorgielah may marry any Coobaroo. We have primary class, and secondary class, and, in addition, totems. Mr. Wm. H. Flower has been able to give us a table illustrating this in the Kuin-Murbura Tribe: Kuialla-laughing jackass. Munalan-curlew [ass. Karilbura-curlew. Kurpalan- laughing jack- Kuialla-laughing-jackass Kurpalan- laughing-jack- Kuialla— laughing jackass Kuialla-eagle-hawk. Karilbura-curlew. Karilbura-clear water. Karilbura-wallaby. In this scheme the law of naming is the same in essence, but is more complex. In the Karilbura and Munal there are two female totems and four male totems; while the Kurpal and Kuialla have two male and four female totems. In the subclasses, a modified form of uterine descent is followed in the totems, the line runs as in the primary classes. Mr. Palmer devotes a large space to the Australian languages, giving vocabularies of seven. A chapter of great value to the anthropologist is that upon the plants used by the natives of Mitchell and Fluiders Rivers for food, medicine, stupefying fish, weapons, and manufactures, 104 species in all. Once in a while a report of this kind is made, and it always arrests attention. Just about the time Sir John Lubbock's discussions upon the amount of land necessary to support a savage were becoming well known, our own Government-surveying parties began to send to the National Museum specimens of all the foods used by our aborigines. No one can look at the long rows of jars containing these foods without realizing that the great Englishman left out a large factor in his problem. The same fact appears from Mr. Palmer's lists. The Australians eat roots, bulbs, rootstalks, stems, leaves, stalks of flowers, buds, skins of stems, fruits in endless variety, and seeds. They eat some of them raw; others roasted, steamed, or macerated; and poisonous plants are subjected to a series of soaking, steeping, mashing, roasting, grinding, and baking that completely destroys the noxious quality and furnishes a wholesome food. Five of the plants named are used to sicken fish. Those set down as medicines are used as veritable drugs and not as sorcerer's charms. The list includes crushed leaves, bark, and flowers, soaked or steeped, and applied externally for a poultice or bathing, or the water is drunk. The Eucalyptus pruinosa bark is bruised and wound tightly around the chest, being kept damp with water. The patient also sits in a decoction of the plant. The young black fellows rub their faces with Drosera indica to make their whiskers grow. Eighteen plants are mentioned as furnishing material for cordage, cloth, nets, boomerangs, reed spears, shields, etc. He has again visited the Troad; he has again hired laborers, and lived in tents, and brought with him great experts, in order to clear up and verify what remained obscure and doubtful in his former investigations. The main difficulty in his mind was the apparent smallness of the early city which he found to have been burned, and which seemed certainly the city which gave a basis and a local habitation to the traditions embodied in the Iliad. The gold found there implied considerable wealth; all the legends pointed to the spot having once been occupied by a powerful and civilized people, and yet there seemed no room for them. His new book gives us the natural solution. He had mistaken the acropolis of the "second city" for the whole of it. His architects proved to them that there had been an extensive lower city around the "Pergama of Priam," which was also burned in the great catastrophe, but was not resettled or built on again. From that time small and obscure descendants occupied the royal site, and left poor and shabby traces of their life. It was not till the successors of Alexander enlarged and beautified the town, and the Romans, with the sentimentality of vulgar upstarts, began to parade Ilium as the home of their ancestors, that another important town marked the persistent site. Moreover, he had also failed to distinguish clearly the second and third layers of remains on this ever re-established site, for the settlers who came after the great conflagration did not level more than they wanted, and the old buildings here and there reach up through the stratum produced by the third settlement. Again, what he calls the sixth city was not marked by a layer of soil, but only by a large assortment of very peculiar non-Hellenic pottery, which he had called Lydian, but which he now declines to call by any name, while insisting upon the fact of its presence and peculiar character. The outcome of his long labor is, therefore, briefly this: on the site of Hissarlik, and there only in the Troad, there are piled up one upon the other a great series of human traces, reaching from the most remote antiquity into the decline of the Roman Empire. These human traces were separated into periods, in that each of them is covered by a more or less distinct layer of earth and ashes, upon which the next is laid. There are at least six of these layers; and what is most important and remarkable, only the topmost (sixth or seventh) is of what we call a historical character. It alone shows the distinctly Hellenic character in both its pottery, its utensils, and its buildings, and reaches a very little way (not more than six feet) into the earth. Nevertheless, we know that a small Greek town existed there for at least six centuries before Christ. If, then, the remains of such antiquity reach down to only six feet under-ground, what shall we say of the antiquity of the older settlements, which are to be traced down to fifty-two feet under the present level? The mind recoils somewhat aghast from so gigantic a computation. But the character of these older remains corroborates our conclusion. They all bear a distinctly prehistoric character. There is no trace of coinage, of writing, of painting on terra cotta, nay, in the deepest layers even the potter's wheel seems hardly known, and the wares are of the rudest hand-made description. The closer details as to these successive layers of pottery are very clearly given in a remarkable letter from Rudolph Virchow-a European name—and printed (pp. 376 et seq.) in the new volume. He there shows "that there is no place in Europe known which could be put in direct connection with any one of the lower six cities of Hissarlik." And again, after describing the character of archaic Greek pottery, he adds: "Seeing, then, that this highly characteristic archaic pottery is totally absent in the deeper strata in Hissarlik, we are at a loss to discover what in all the world is to be called Greek in them. With equal truth might many kinds of vases from Mexico and Yucatan, nay, even from the river Amazon, be called Greek." This is in answer to the ignorant people who attempt to assign late historical dates to all the successive settlements, save one. The non-Hellenic, if not pre-historic, character of these rude wares is singularly illustrated by comparing them with the oldest pottery our author found at Mycena. In the latter, though there can be little doubt that their date is not later than ten centuries before Christ, we find the unmistakable character of Hellenic work. They are the direct ancestors of the splendid vases imported to |