CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE.

1. AGRICULTURE.

BEYOND the ordinary labours of the field preceding and succeeding seed time, which have this year been carried on under favourable circumstances, the subjects principally occupying agricultural attention during the past quarter have been rather of a social, or even political, than of a practical and scientific nature; and they are the less proper for discussion, or even enumeration here. We may, however, refer to the condition of the agricultural labourer as one of them. It has been properly enough characterized as extremely unsatisfactory in many parts of the country, where the ignorance of the class is very great and their wages very low. Schools are, however, bearing fruit everywhere, and the proportion of country workmen who can read and write a letter, is every year increasing; and the wages received by them, though still various in different districts (indicating the strength of tie which still holds the labouring population to their parish), is less various than the mere money paid to them would lead one to suppose. There are many districts where the money wages are declared to be only 9s. or 10s., or even less, a week, in which a man is better off than he would be in a town with 20s. to 25s. weekly. The real payment for services includes in the former case, cottage and garden, 5l. or 67. for the harvest month, constant payment all the year, and the opportunity both of earning triple wages at occasional piecework and of buying cheap flour and fuel. In an instance known to us near Rochford, Essex, where the offer of a 51. prize at length brought forth a properly vouched year's cash-account of the income and expenditure of an agricultural labourer who was receiving nominally 11s. a week, the actual receipts for the year exceeded 50%. Those who compare the nominal wages of the labourer in town and country, are thus contrasting things of entirely different character, and are in danger of misleading themselves and others. Good service will, nevertheless, we readily admit, be done by any one who shall set himself to help good working-men to improve their circumstances, by sending them from over-populated districts to places where labourers are more wanted, and wages accordingly are higher; and this has been done of late by the Rev. Canon Girdlestone, at Halberton, in Devonshire, to an extent which has at length excited public attention.

Returning now to our task as mere chroniclers of agricultural events, we have to mention Mr. Gülich's mode of potato growing,

reported from Holstein, which has been designed with a view to escape the so-called potato disease. He grows his potato plants in hillocks, a yard apart every way, planting the tubers individually on earth over a spadeful of compost or manure in each spot, and taking care that each tuber is planted with the eye downwards. The shoots rise in a circle round the tuber, and in the course of their growth they are separated wider by additions of earth in the middle of this circle, and fall down into the intervening spaces whence the earth has been removed for this purpose. There is thus ultimately a set of hillocks of which the tops are bare and the base surrounded with foliage; and the idea is that the alleged freedom from disease which ensues must be owing to the blight fungus being washed downwards into the intervals between the plants, and away from the crop of young tubers which remain under the central hillock of bare earth.

The spring time of the year always brings round discussions of the injury done to farmers by fraud in the seed and the manure trades. It is alleged that the phrase "nett seed" is a common one among wholesale seedsmen, indicating that seed which is not "nett," and which therefore must be fraudulently mixed with dead and worthless additions, is also commonly delivered. There can be no doubt that the immense quantities of seed used in order to obtain an agricultural crop-often ten and twenty-fold the quantity which would, if all would grow, supply more than plants enough can be explained only on the theory that a very large quantity of seed does not grow at all. Manures, in like manner, are the subject of fraudulent admixture; and sales by auction, professedly of damaged cargoes, often take-in the unwary who think to catch a bargain by cheap purchases of worthless stuff that is really dear at any price. Some service is done by repeatedly calling attention to the risks of this kind which the farmer runs; and we therefore mention the subject here.

The theory of the under-drainage of land has recently received some discussion in the agricultural journals. The policy of leaving the upper ends of pipe-drains open to the air has been defended on the ground that it facilitates the passage of water through the pipe. The idea seems to us an entire mistake. The sole agency in the drainage of land is the weight of the water in the soil, which ensures its passage downwards and outwards, as soon as any channel of escape for it is opened. If the soil be air-tight, so that an airpassage is required to the underground pipe at the upper end of it, still more must it be water-tight, and then, of course, incapable of being drained at all. But no soil is in such a plight as this. It only needs that a channel be cut three or four feet deep in any soil, and any water that is in it will begin to ooze and trickle through it, and thus establish that movement of the rain-water from the surface

through the substance of the soil and subsoil which brings all the circumstances of increased fertility in its train.

Among the events of the quarter having an indirect bearing on agricultural subjects, we may mention that the University of Edinburgh has issued a programme of examinations in various branches of applied science, under which students may receive diplomas as Bachelor and Master of Agriculture. There can be no doubt that a successful passage, thus guaranteed, through well-conducted examinations on all the subjects with which a man must be familiar to mark him out as a thoroughly well-educated agriculturist, will ultimately materially affect the future professional career of individual agricultural students; and in this way it will benefit agriculture and agriculturists generally. Professor John Wilson, of the Edinburgh University, has done good service to the cause of general agricultural progress by obtaining at the hands of so distinguished an educational body this recognition of agriculture as one of the professions for which a liberal education is desirable.

We add that the subject of the beet-sugar manufacture and of the sugar-beet cultivation has continued to engage attention. Mr. Gibbs, of Gilwell Park, near Woodford, lately read a paper before the Society of Arts, advocating the use of his drying-engine for the reduction of crop-weight in the field, and the consequent reduction of the expense of carriage, which more than anything else tends to discourage the establishment of local sugar factories. And Mr. Baruchson, of Liverpool, has published a most exhaustive treatise on the agricultural, manufacturing, and commercial aspects of the subject, which ought to be read by every one who is disposed to introduce the cultivation of the sugar-beet upon his farm.

2. ARCHEOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY.

THE interest attaching to bone-caves yielding remains of man and works of art is still kept at a high pitch by new discoveries. During the past quarter a most interesting account of some explorations in Portuguese bone-caves* has reached us; and we thus obtain evidence that in the district of Cesareda man once existed in so uncivilized a condition that he lived in caves, ate human flesh, and possessed chipped flints for his only weapons. M. Delgado describes three caves in the Jurassic limestone of Cesareda, all of which he has thoroughly explored. In one (the Casa da Moura) he obtained

* Da existencia do Homen no nosso solo em Tempos mui remotos provada pelo estudos das cavernas. Primeiro opusculo. Noticia ácerca das Grutas da Cesareda. Por J. F. D. Delgado.

evidence of the existence of two deposits, a lower, resting on the stalagmite floor, composed of sand and angular fragments of the surrounding rock; and an upper, composed of a sandy loam. The lower one yielded many flint implements and fragments of charcoal, with bones of Felis, Canis, Cervus, Lupus, &c. In its deepest part the author found a human skull and lower jaw, but these he regards as having been buried at a subsequent period. The upper deposit contained a large number of fragmentary human bones, and numerous polished stone celts, flint flakes, bone instruments, &c., and a bronze arrow-head in its lowest part, which had probably been buried there. The fragmentary condition of the human bones, which had been cut and scraped, the long bones having also been split, appears to show that the author is right in regarding the cave as a burialplace of a tribe of cannibals. Bones of the wolf, fox, a dog, horse, deer, sheep, &c., coarse pottery marked with lines or rows of dots, shells pierced for ornaments, and other objects, were also found. The other caves yielded remains similar to those obtained from this upper deposit, one of them yielding in addition a portion of the lower jar of Ursus arctos. If the author's determination of this relic be accurate, it is the most important animal remain which these caves have as yet yielded.

While on the subject of bone-caves we should notice the publication of the fifth part of the 'Reliquiæ Aquitanicæ.' It contains the conclusion of Professor Rupert Jones's geological sketch of the Vézère, figures and descriptions of a number of flint implements, and a most interesting essay by Mr. A. C. Anderson, "On the Resemblance of many of the Dordogne Works of Art to the Implements used by the North American Tribes, either now or at some former period." This resemblance is in many instances very striking, and suggests two questions for consideration, namely: (1), Are the uses for which the implements were made the same, or analogous, in both cases? and (2), Does the resemblance imply any affinity between the tribes? The first question will probably receive an affirmative reply from almost any antiquary; but the answers to the second would probably show great diversity of opinion. We shall only quote a sentence from Mr. Anderson, as an indication of one class of opinions:-"I believe that, under similar circumstances and conditions of things, isolated branches of the human race will arrive, in simple matters of domestic or offensive art, at nearly similar conclusions, each independently of the other."

Dr. Geinitz has given a useful summary of the objects exhibited in the Paris Exhibition of last year in relation to the Antiquity of Man, in the second number of the 'Neues Jahrbuch' for this year. The reported occurrence of traces of human work in Miocene deposits is not regarded by him as having been yet proved to the satisfaction of critical antiquaries and naturalists.

This question of the Miocene age of the human species was discussed before the Académie des Sciences on April 20th, when MM. Garrigou and Filhol requested the opening of a sealed packet which had been deposited with the Academy by them on May 16, 1864. From this it appears that at that date their observations made in the deposits of Sansan led them to regard the Miocene age of man as extremely probable. The evidence on which they relied consisted of bones split longitudinally, as they are frequently found in caverns, having been thus broken by man for the purpose of extracting the marrow. The evidence is slender; hence, in all probability, their timidity in not publishing their views four years ago; but now that other evidence, more or less questionable, pointing in the same direction, has been discovered, they have naturally regarded their own observations as equally worthy of publicity.

In the last volume of the 'Proceedings' of the Asiatic Society of Bengal we notice a paper on the Ethnology of India, by Dr. J. B. Davis, in which that author strives to show that philology is not so sure a guide in Ethnology as craniology; consequently he is led to object to the Aryan hypothesis. "If Europeans and Hindoos be of the same family, why cannot the former migrate to and live in India? How is it that the people of India are celebrated for the smallness of their heads, while the inhabitants of Europe have large heads?" Again, he remarks that it is admitted that the SyroArabian division of mankind is physically identical with the Aryan section; still the two cannot be allied, because the languages of the two families utterly sunder them." In all probability, as Mr. Blanford remarked at the reading of the paper, a natural classification must be arrived at by the aid of a number of characters, as in Botany. Dr. Davis also objects to the hypothesis of the unity of the human race, regarding our species as, "in the main, an aggregate of families formed by the hand of the Creator, in every different locality in which it is found, and each constituted by that wise Providence for the climate and productions with which it is surrounded."

We also notice a series of admirable notes on the occurrence of chipped flakes of agate, quartzite, flint, &c., in India, followed by a table in which all the information on the subject is shown at once. The implements are divided into the three following classes:A. Cores and flakes of agate, flint, &c.

B. Chipped axes, &c., chiefly of quartzite.

C. Polished 'celts' of trap, chert, jade, &c.

These objects are extensively distributed, not only in India itself, but also in some of the islands of the Indian Ocean.

With respect to the antiquity of man in India, Mr. W. T. Blanford expresses his belief that there is evidence of the existence of man in India at a much earlier period than in Europe. Unfortunately the "evidence" consists of but one flake found in situ in