Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 33.djvu/586

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

like root. When in use, the weight was slipped over the handle till it rested at about the middle of the stick, like a collar. An old woman living in a village of the San Buenaventura Indians, thirty miles distant, corroborated the above statement as to the use of the stones. When one was put into her hands it at once excited her surprise and interest. In reply to the question, "What do you know of its use?" she instantly seized a small stick from the fireplace and slipped the ring down to its middle, holding it there with the left hand, and began to dig industriously into the dirt floor. From an intelligent half-breed of the same village, Mr. Henshaw learned that many of the stone disks were used in a game which was played as follows: A piece of level ground was selected for a court, and was made very smooth and hard. At one corner of the court was stationed a man whose business it was to cast the disks. The player, with a lance six or seven feet long in his hand, stood on one side of the court. Running a little distance, the bowler rolled a disk swiftly across the court, when the lance-thrower darted forward and cast his lance, the object being to transfix the disk as it rolled past. A successful throw counted one point, ten being the game. Dr. W. J. Hoffman was informed that at Santa Barbara the bow and arrow were in use in this game in place of the lance. The San Buenaventura half-breed stated that some of the perforated disks of hard stone were made for the express purpose of fashioning pipes. The end of the stone to be fashioned was inserted into the hole of a perforated stone and turned by the hand till reduced to the proper shape. The perforated stone hence served as a kind of die. Mr. Henshaw has found no evidence to show that these stones were used as net-sinkers, spindle-whorls, or club-heads.

A Fatal "One Glass."—A new book, called "Manners Makyth Man," gives a story told by a bishop of how he persuaded a man recovering from delirium tremens to become a teetotaler. "Years went by, and not a drop of intoxicating liquor entered his mouth. Six, seven, eight years passed, and his resolution remained unbroken. On the anniversary of the eighth sober year his friends, thinking the reformation complete, resolved to give a dinner in his honor. A family circle, rendered happy by the temperance of its head, received the congratulations of intimate friends. But it was a feast of deadly wine. Healths were proposed, and he who was being honored was told that to drink his own health in one glass could certainly do him no harm after totally abstaining for eight years. He drank the glass, and two years afterward I was called in to visit a poor drunkard who was on his death-bed by reason of that one 'friendly glass.'"

Technical Education.—In a paper on "Technical Education," G. S. Ramsay maintains that British workmen are not deficient in technical skill in any mechanical department, but, as a rule, distance those of most other nations. British work is inferior to foreign in two classes of departments: in those connected with processes requiring a scientific knowledge of chemistry of the highest kind, and in those in which success depends essentially upon taste, and upon the faculty of design. An instance under the former category is given in the manufacture of coal-tar dyes, which has been carried off from "under the very noses" of the British by the superior scientific skill and industrial capacity of another nation. British manufacturers furnish the material; Germans, under the direction of trained chemists, work it up, and sell back to the British the products in the form of beautiful colors and concentrated essences. Thus a works near Basle employs a chemist of comprehensive training and experience, three departmental chemists, and several assistants. Another one, near Frankfort, employs fifty-one scientific chemists. The manufacture of beet-sugar has been developed in Germany into a great trade by being treated as a scientific business, "to be carried on in strict obedience to the commands of scientific experts." In these operations the-technical part of the work is made subordinate to the scientific principles on which it is based. British butter and cheese are being superseded in the markets by American and Canadian products, through the neglect of scientific improvements at home and the introduction of them in the competing countries. "In each of these cases," says Mr. Ramsay,