istence of man. We have likewise reached the same result in our search for human skulls and bones. We have to recognize that students can not assume that man existed in the Tertiary, or that there is any probability that the human race had its beginning in that epoch; on the contrary, we find a great void which we try to fill with fantastic imaginings, but which furnishes us with no real specimen.

After the Congress of Lisbon, students were more moderate and confined themselves to the search for known objects. Among these objects, archæological finds predominated, and it is easy to understand why archæology has more and more taken the place of anthropology. Palæanthropological objects are so rare, and for the most part so liable to suspicion, that even till the present time the attempt to describe the most ancient race of Quaternary men is beyond the power of science. We have had two examples in Europe that afforded little encouragement: the attempts based on the Canstadt and on the Neanderthal skulls, which, as two eminent students once supposed, belonged to the extinct aborigines of the primitive European race. We discussed the question raised over these two skulls fifteen years ago, at the Congress of German Anthropologists in Ulm, and found that the Canstadt skull did not belong to the Quaternary, while the Neanderthal skull was at least very far from having a typical form.

I shall not examine the whole series of similar discoveries, most of which have only furnished us single exceptional skulls. But I must declare that even if these skulls had been what they were described as being and their geological position had been exactly defined, they could not have constituted proof of the existence of an inferior primitive race that could be regarded as a step between animals and existing man. Many of these skulls appear to be very ancient; but they resemble in all respects the skulls of modern races, and some of them even those of civilized races. We seek in vain for the "missing link" connecting man with the monkey or any other animal species.

We must, however, understand ourselves on a preliminary question. There exists a tradition common to all peoples, or we might say a dogma common to all religions, recognized by all students, ancient and modern, that the human body has an animal organization; that the same physiological and pathological laws rule human and animal life alike. Notwithstanding this uniformity, there exists a definite barrier separating man from the animal, which has not yet been effaced-heredity, which transmits to children the faculties of their parents. We have never seen a monkey bring a man into the world, nor a man produce a monkey. All men having a simian appearance are simply pathological variants. The opinion of Carl Vogt that microcephalous men,

resembling simian animals, are produced by atavism, has been wholly abandoned since students have reached the conviction that the skulls of microcephals have indexes of pathological formation, with deficiencies arising from degeneracy.

The human organism, especially in the embryonic stage, is distinguished by many features that have been borrowed, not from the monkey only, but also from other animals. The living elements, the cells, present us the same types in man as in the mammals; sometimes these resemblances in the embryo continue to exist, and are even developed after birth. But this persistence or hyperplasy can not be made to serve as proof of the animal origin of man. Let us take this example of a hyperplasy of this kind: there is in the higher anthropoid apes a bony ramification that connects the jugular of the temporal with the frontal bone. It is sometimes developed in man, and is wanting in some individuals among the higher monkeys. I have shown, and M. Anoutchine has confirmed it, that this ramification occurs very frequently in the Australians, and we both regard the peculiarity as of simian origin. But we can not conclude from that that the Australians are simian-like, for the same peculiarity has been remarked, in some infrequent cases, in the skulls of Europeans; while there is not an example of men having such heads having furnished any other indication of simian organization or development. The bony ramification of the temporal jugular is nothing else than a special peculiarity, sometimes individual, sometimes racial, like curly hair, for example. When we look at a negro's head we might say that it resembles a sheep or a poodle; but, so far as we know, nobody has yet expressed the opinion that negroes are descended from sheep or from dogs. Still, the negroes are like sheep and poodle dogs in the hereditary transmission of a special peculiarity in their hair. In spite of that, their heads in no way resemble those of the animals we have mentioned. Bearing in mind these observations, we have become more circumspect now in our reasonings upon individual or racial analogies between man and animals; we certainly shall not forget that the human organization is in its essentials an animal organism, and that the monstrosities which occasionally appear may be regarded as results of atavism; but we shall require more convincing arguments before we assume a near relationship of man with any definite animal.

It was generally believed a few years ago that there yet existed a few human races which still remained in the primitive inferior condition of their organization. But all these races have been objects of minute investigation, and we know that they have an organization like ours, often indeed superior to that of supposed higher races; thus, the Eskimo head and the head of the Tierra del Fue

gians belong to the perfected types. Some races have the same skulls very small, of about the same volume as the microcephalous skulls; for example, the inhabitants of the Andaman Islands and the Veddahs of Ceylon have been regarded as microcephalic. A more exact study has, however, shown a difference between them and the real microcephalic races. The head of an Andamanislander or of a Veddah is very regular, only all its parts are a little smaller than among men of the ordinary races. Nanicephalic heads (dwarf), as I call them, have none of those characteristic anomalies that distinguish really microcephalic heads.

A single race, that of the Orang-Simaings and the OrangCekai of the peninsula of Malacca, still remains unstudied. The single traveler who has penetrated into the mountainous countries inhabited by them, the bold Russian, Miklukho Maklai, has ascertained that certain isolated individuals among Simaings are small and have curled hair. A new expedition has been sent into that country to study the anthropology of the Orang-Cekai, from which I have recently received a skull and a few locks of hair; the stock is really a black race with curly hair, the brachycephalous head of which is distinguished by very moderate interior volume, but it does not offer the most trifling sign of bestial development.

Thus we are repulsed at every line of the assault upon the human question. All the researches undertaken with the aim of finding continuity in progressive development have been without result. There exists no proanthropos, no man-monkey, and the "connecting link" remains a phantom.

Scientific anthropology begins with living races; and the first step in the construction of the doctrine of transformism will be the explanation of the way the human races have been formed, and of the means by which they have acquired their specific peculiarities while still preserving hereditary transmission. That is the future field of anthropological debate and investigation. But this field is outside of the limitations of our Congress. It is easy at first sight to suppose a dolichocephalous skull to be transformed into a brachycephalous skull, but still nobody has ever observed the transformation of a dolichocephalous race into a brachycephalous one, or vice versa, or of a negro race into an Aryan race.

Prehistoric anthropology should find methods of facilitating acquaintance with the types of ancient races and peoples, and of making possible the discovery of them among living men. It might add to that, if the occasion should present itself, data respecting strange individual cases, by the aid of which it is impossible to form a continuous line or constitute a genealogical tree, but which should be kept in the scientific lumber-room till

the time when we can find the intermediate links that may unite them into a series.

And now let us continue faithful to the glorious traditions which our great masters have bequeathed to us. The majority of the students whose names are inscribed in the preceding congresses were archæologists. Lartet and Dessort, Vorso and Liche, Hozedine and Clericci, Ouvarov and Romer, who remain the protecting genius of our congress, have shown us how we must work. To select an example, questions like that of the discovery of copper, and of its value as a medium of exchange, ought to be problems of the greatest interest to us.-Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Revue Scientifique.

IT

THE ROTATION OF THE FARM.

BY APPLETON MORGAN.

T was an English maxim, as old as Harold, and it is probably a safe one to-day, that "horses feel a famine first." The meaning, of course, is that, in the commencement of a dearth of cereals, the stables would be pillaged of the grains fed to the horses by a hungry populace before it clamored to the authorities for bread.

They seem to have changed all that in Massachusetts. There lies before me a pamphlet, issued by the authority of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, entitled A Descriptive Catalogue of Farms in Massachusetts, Abandoned or partially Abandoned (issued under the provisions of chapter 280 of the Acts of 1891), by William R. Sessions, Secretary of the State Board of Agriculture, November, 1891. Certainly this is a startling head-line, and those of us who had begun to have faith in modern methods, in agricultural colleges, in the chemistry of crop rotation, by which the element exhausted by the yield of one year should be supplied by the next, confronted by it might begin to weaken as to the compensations, and what had been supposed to be the eternal laws of reciprocal affinities! Is it possible, we would perhaps find ourselves asking, that the Massachusetts farmer, the nearest in the Union in point of mileage to the two or three greatest of its markets, should "abandon" the fields of his ancestors? That, after generations of tillage, any tracts of agricultural land anywhere are diverted to other utilities in the course of their prime function of supporting life is a familiar contingency. Lands once agricultural may be covered by residences or factories as neighboring towns spread out to include them. But absolute abandonment would seem the rarest of possibilities, so long, at least, as

the United States is relied upon, as it is to-day, for its overproportion of the food of this planet of ours. Almost three fifths of the grains, fully half of the meat supply-not to mention the cotton yield of the civilized world, are expected to be forthcoming from this direction, and yet the New England farmer proposes to "abandon" his share in this great field-a field wherein the farmer, as a farmer, has practically no competition to meet at all! A great deal is being said about the surrender of the farmer class to the appetite for other pursuits. But really it is not, or ought not to be, as bad as that. If other things are equal, as they should be, and if all the adjustments are true, as they should be, there should always be a farmer class and always farms. And while the New England farmer suffers from the American failing of making farms too large, equally with his far Western brother, yet his offset is that, unlike the Western farmer, he does not suffer from immoderate or too numerous middlemen (handlers or brokers), but has, or can have, his market at his door.

The horses in Massachusetts have never yet raised the alarm of famine-not even in the days of the Embargo, or in the cruel times of 1812-'16, when the noble old Bay State was forced by her patriotism not only to send soldiers into a war of which she did not approve, but to see her own peculiar industries ruined, and the only ones ruined, while the war for which she was supplying bone and sinew stimulated every rival industry in her sister States: a pelican situation, which, bad as it was, did not dishearten her or make her falter in her duty. But even then the Massachusetts farmer, who paid a dollar for his hoe, sixty cents a yard for his calico, and thirteen cents for a nutmeg (not a wooden one from a sister State), did not "abandon" his farm. The horses then or since have not been heard from. Why, then, should the State in its paternal capacity step in, announce that her farmers had abandoned her farms, and offer them for sale to strangers? And, so far as the stranger is concerned, he might well ask why he should be expected to buy that which is advertised as useless. One can not exactly break up a farm, as one breaks up a ship, and sell it for junk. At what point, one might ask, does the interest of the stranger directly accrue? Again, there are so many ways of utilizing one's farm. It can be a stock farm, a grazing farm, a dairy, a fruit, a market garden, a poultry, a seeding, a nursery farm. Salt hay is cut from marshes. Cranberries grow in bogs; and if one could not raise cranberries, how about frogs? There is always a demand for the esculent hind legs of those interesting amphibians in some seaboard city; and, indeed, our political economy will not listen to any such thing as a failure in demand or supply of luxuries, however bizarre, any more than of necessities in their due proportions. It is related that even in the