anxious to open to talent, industry, and character the field in which they have succeeded. But the public must not be misled by acts of kindness and deeds of brotherliness; this is the fine hypocrisy of a powerful secret organization, an unscrupulous literary trust which exists for the sole purpose of keeping the doors of access to popular favor closed and barred." To sum up these "practical suggestions," the aspirant is thus counseled in substance: Assume that you have genius and do not need practise; that the return of any manuscript always means editorial ignorance and depravity; that your failure to secure a hearing is due solely to the jealousy of those who are already in the field; and never, under any circumstances, ask whether anything is amiss with your own work. Verlaine up on his native heath. We quote the better part of "For one thing, I was not prepared to see anything very lurid and diabolique: life is really not so picturesque as all that. I knew besides that he had been a schoolmaster in England; and can you imagine anything more tedious and toilsome than to be the French master,' the poor despised, 'frog-eating Mounseer Jacques' of boys' stories, the butt of all their facetious brutality? If ever anything was calculated to make a man diabolique! I trust biographers will not forget to place all this depressing drudgery to our 'vagabond's' credit. Think of it! The first poet of France correcting French exercises! The poet of the passions conjugating the verb aimer in its hideous grammatical reality! . . flashed on me incongruously the thought of our English laureate's stately home by the sea, in which, jealously guarded by hedges and flunkeys, the poet chiseled his calm stanzas; and all the vagabond in me leapt out to meet the unpretentious child of Paris. He greeted me with simple cordiality; and, ugly and coarse tho his face was, it was lit up throughout by a pleasant smile. His notorious leg was bandaged, but not repulsively. No, 'homely' is the only impression I shall ever have of Verlaine, the man. Even in that much maligned 'macabresque' head of his there was more of the bonhomme than of the poet or the satyr. The little garret was his all in ail; a bed took up half the space. On the table stood the remains of supper. A few shelves of books, a sketch or two, and a bird-cage, with, I think, a canary, were the only attempts at ornament. "Such was Verlaine at the climax of his fame, when he had won a sure immortality; simple and childlike, and with a child's unshamed acceptance of any money one might leave behind on the mantelpiece. He seems to have made very little by his verses. He spoke English quite well, having probably acquired it when teaching French; and he was perhaps more proud of it than of his poems. Mr. Moore says he wished to translate Tennyson. He read aloud a poem he had just written in celebration of his own fiftieth birthday. There was an allusion to a 'crystal goblet.' 'Ce verre-là!' he interpolated, with a humorous smile, pointing to a cheap glass with the dregs of absinthe that stood on the table. There was also an allusion to a 'bluebird,' a sort of symbol of the magic of spring, I fancy, that flutters through many of his poems. (The 'plumage bleuté de l'orgueil' figures in one of his very last verses.) When he arrived at this 'blue-bird' he pointed to the cage with the same droll twinkle: Cet oiseau-ci' When I left him he stood at the head of the gloomy stone stairs to light me down, and the image of him in his red cotton nightcap is still vivid. And now he is only an immortal name. Ah well! after the English schoolrooms, the French prisons, the Parisian garrets and hospitals, the tomb is not so bad. "In the absurd actual he had to earn his bread and butter, and man can not live by poetry alone, unless one sings the joys and sorrows of the middle classes. It was rather late at night before, having vainly hunted for him in his favorite restaurants, I found the narrow, poverty-stricken rue in which Verlaine was living a year or so ago. Passing through a dark courtyard, I had to mount interminable stone stairs, lighting foul French matches as I went, to relieve the blackness. At last I arrived outside his door, very near the sky. I knocked. A voice called out, 'I've gone to bed.' I explained my lateness and said I would call tomorrow. 'No, no! Attendez !' I heard him jump out of bed, stumble and grope about, and then strike a match; and in another instant the door opened and in the interstice appeared a homely nightcapped bourgeois pulling on his trousers. There "In giving him place with the immortals I feel no hesitation. An English clergyman found immortality by writing one poem"The Burial of Sir John Moore'-and, however posterity may appraise Verlaine's work as a whole, he has left three or four lyrics which can only die if the French language dies, or if mankind in its latter end undergoes a paralysis of the poetic sense such as Darwin suffered from in his old age. He is the poet of rhythm, of the nuance, of personal emotion. French poetry has always leant to the frigid, the academic, the rhetorical-in a word, to the prosaic. The spirit of Boileau has ruled it from his cold marble urn. It has always lacked 'soul,' the haunting magic, the elusive wistfulness, the 'finer light in light,' that are of the essence of poetry. This subtle and delicate echo of far-off celestial music, together with some of the most spiritual poems that Catholicism has ever inspired, have been added to French literature by the gross-souled, gross-bodied vagrant of the prisons and the hospitals! Which is a mystery to the Philistine." How and When Mrs. Burnett Writes.-From "A Chat with Frances Hodgson Burnett," in The Illustrated Amer ican, we extract the following, Mrs. Burnett speaking: "What is my method of writing? I am not sure that I have a method. When I am in the humor I write very fast and easily. When I am not in the humor I have nothing to say. I have sometimes amused myself by saying that it was not really I who wrote, but something weird and interesting which possessed me. Spooks. you know! The only habit I have which approaches a rule is that I always work in the morning. I seem more alive then than at any other time. When I have a story on hand I work upon it with a kind of regularity. Four stories in my life, however, have taken possession of me and insisted on being written, so to speak. One was a 'Story of the Latin Quarter,' published in the old Scribner's (now The Century) years ago. The leading thought was suggested to my mind by a poem I read one evening. I read it at the house of a friend, and the story which grew out of it immediately so filled me and overwhelmed me that I could not detach myself from it, and I have no doubt that my friend thought I was ill or partially demented, I was so ab I wrote the story the next day. I felt it very intensely. It seemed almost too much to bear at the time. The closing words are: 'For that which Life had denied her, Death had given!' and I remember that when they came into my mind I broke down into an anguished fit of crying." stracted. HOW ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS WROTE HER FIRST STORY. IT T will interest many to know how the author of "Gates Ajar" began her literary career. In "Chapters of a Life," in the April McClure's, we find the narrative from her own pen, from which we quote as follows: "The town of Lawrence was three miles and a half from Andover. Up to the year 1860 we had considered Lawrence chiefly in the light of a place to drive to. To the girlish resources which could, in those days, only include a trip to Boston at the call of some fate too vast to be expected more than two or three times a year, Lawrence offered consolations in the shape of dry-goods and restaurant ice-cream, and a slow, delicious drive in the family carryall through sand flats and pine woods, and past the largest bed of the sweetest violets that ever dared the blasts of a New England spring. To the pages of the gazetteer Lawrence would have been known as a manufacturing town of importance. Upon the map of our young fancy the great mills were sketched in lightly; we looked up from the restaurant ice-cream to see the 'hands' pour out for dinner, a dark and restless, but a patient, throng; used, in those days, to standing eleven hours and a quarter-women and girls-at their looms, six days of the week, and making no audible complaints; for socialism had not reached Lawrence, and anarchy was content to bray in distant parts of the geography at which the factory people had not arrived when they left school. 'Sometimes we counted the great mills as we drove up Essex Street-having come over the bridge by the roaring dam that tamed the proud Merrimac to spinning cotton-Pacific, Atlantic, Washington, Pemberton, but this was an idle, esthetic pleasure. We did not think about the mill-people; they seemed as far from us as the coal-miners of a vague West, or the down-gatherers on the crags of shores whose names we did not think it worth while to remember. One January evening, we were forced to think about the mills with curdling horror that no one living in that locality when the tragedy happened will forget. 'At five o'clock the Pemberton Mills, all hands being at the time on duty, without a tremor of warning, sank to the ground. "At the erection of the factory a pillar with a defective core had passed careless inspectors. In technical language, the core had 'floated' an eighth of an inch from its position. The weak spot in the too thin wall of the pillar had bided its time, and yielded. The roof, the walls, the machinery, fell upon seven hundred and fifty living men and women, and buried them. Most of these were rescued; but eighty-eight were killed. As the night came on, those watchers on Andover Hill who could not join the rescuing parties, saw a strange and fearful light at the North. "Where we were used to watching the beautiful belt of the lighted mills blaze-a zone of laughing fire from east to west, upon the horizon bar—a red and awful glare went up. The mill had taken fire. A lantern, overturned in the hands of a man who was groping to save an imprisoned life, had flashed to the cotton, or the wool, or the oil with which the ruins were saturated. One of the historic conflagrations of New England resulted. "With blanching cheeks we listened to the whispers that told us how the mill-girls, caught in the ruins beyond hope of escape, began to sing. They were used to singing, poor things, at their looms-mill-girls always are—and their young souls took courage from the familiar sound of one another's voices. They sang the hymns and songs which they had learned in the schools and churches. No classical strains, no 'music for music's sake,' ascended from that furnace; no ditty of love or frolic; but the plain, religious outcries of the people: 'Heaven is my home,' 'Jesus, lover of my soul,' and 'Shall we gather at the river?' Voice after voice dropped. The fire raced on. A few brave girls sang still: 'Shall we gather at the river, There to walk and worship ever?' "But the startled Merrimac rolled by, red as blood beneath the glare of the burning mills, and it was left to the fire and the river to finish the chorus. "At the time this tragedy occurred, I felt my share of its horror, like other people; but no more than that. My brother, being of the privileged sex, was sent over to see the scene; but I was not allowed to go. "Years after, I can not say just how many, the half-effaced negative came back to form under the chemical of some new perception of the significance of human tragedy. "It occurred to me to use the event as the basis of a story. To this end I set forth to study the subject. I had heard nothing in those days about 'material,' and conscience in the use of it, and little enough about art. We did not talk about realism then. Of critical phraseology I knew nothing; and of critical standards only what I had observed by reading the best fiction. Poor novels and stories I did not read. I do not remember being forbidden them; but, by that parental art finer than denial, they were absent from my convenience. "It needed no instruction in the canons of art, however, to teach me that to do a good thing, one must work hard for it. So I gave the best part of a month to the study of the Pemberton Mill tragedy, driving to Lawrence, and investigating every possible avenue of information left at that too long remove of time which might give the data. I visited the rebuilt mills, and studied the machinery. I consulted engineers and officials and physicians, newspaper men, and persons who had been in the mill at the time of its fall. I scoured the files of old local papers, and from these I took certain portions of names, actually involved in the catastrophe; tho, of course, fictitiously used. When there was nothing left for me to learn upon the subject, I came home and wrote a little story called 'The Tenth of January,' and sent it to The Atlantic Monthly, where it appeared in due time. "This story is of more interest to its author than it can possibly be now to any reader, because it distinctly marked for me the first recognition which I received from literary people." NOTES. PADEREWSKI's home is in Paris, near the house that Victor Hugo occupied. In his domestic life the great pianist has had much sorrow. His wife died some years ago, leaving him only one child, who is a hopeless invalid. This little boy occupies himself on his couch by the study of languages, and altho only twelve years old can already speak three or four more or less fluently.-The Etude. HENRIK PONTOPPIDAN is the latest foreign author to be captured by an English publisher for translation and publication. Dent now has in press an authorized edition of two novels by this celebrated Danish writer, "Emmanuel" and "The Promised Land." The translation is by Mrs. Edgar Lucas, and each volume is illustrated by thirty drawings, done by Miss Nelly Erichsen during a late trip to Denmark. Some years ago an extraordinary religious awakening took place in Denmark, the result of the teachings of the celebrated Bishop Grundtvig among the peasant class. Pontoppidan's father was a clergyman of the school of Grundtvig, and the novelist's work reflects the enthusiasm of the time, as well as the gradual decreases of political freedom in Denmark since that time. The novelist was born in Jutland in 1857, and his literary career dates from 1881.-London Correspondent of The Literary Era. COCKERMOUTH was the birthplace of Wordsworth, and it has decided to erect in its park, as a memorial to the poet and his sister Dorothy, a very beautiful fountain. It is of polished dark red Swedish granite with (on the top) a bronze figure of a child. Standing on a plain basement, the fountain rises in a series of molded bases and shaft to the basin, which is a particularly fine block. From the middle of the basin rises the graceful molded pedestal on which is placed the bronzed figure. On the shaft of the memorial is cut the inscription: In Memory of the Childhood of W. W., April 7, 1770; D. W., Christmas Day, 1771. The erection of the fountain is the result of a movement among admirers of the poet in the locality of his birthplace, and the unveiling, it is understood, will be accompanied by considerable public ceremony. DR. ROBERTSON NICOLL says that Mr. J. B. Walker did not go in the right way about his quest of Mr. Gladstone as a contributor to The Cosmopolitan. To offer him a dollar a word for anything he might write was munificent, but it was not tactful. Mr. Gladstone takes offense at the idea of writing merely for money. He is not to be got at in that way. You must, says Dr. Nicoll, find out the subjects that interest him, and mildly and deferentially suggest that he should treat them. If he is disposed to do so, the question of money has to be very delicately handled. Mr. Gladstone is not exorbitant, but he knows the price he puts on his wares. values very much editorial interest in his subject," adds Dr. Nicoll, "and I have known him converse with much affability and pleasure with the sub-editor who took his proofs, if he found that he had been following his arguments. For a review article, Mr. Gladstone's price is about £200, and he has been known to write magazine articles for about £40."—" The Lounger," in The Critic. "He SCIENCE. PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF THOUGHT. UNDER NDER this title, John Elfreth Watkins, a correspondent of the Buffalo Express, describes a visit to the laboratory of Dr. Arthur MacDonald in Washington and a test of one of the new pieces of apparatus for experimenting upon the effect of various stimuli and mental processes upon the circulation of the blood. Mr. Watkins was himself the object of a series of experiments, of which he gives an account in his article. We extract. from this his description of a few of the most striking. Says Mr. Watkins: "The first experiment was for ascertaining the effects of thought TESTING INVOLUNTARY TREMBLING OF THE TONGUE. For this was used an instrument like which none upon my blood. has ever before been used in this country. It was a good-sized cylindrical jar, to the neck of which was attached a tapering rubber sleeve, designed to fit tightly around the wrist. The vessel was filled with water at blood temperature and into the rubber sleeve I thrust my hand until it was submerged in the liquid. The rubber sleeve was pulled up until perfectly air-tight. To a tube in the top of the jar was fitted a rubber hose connecting with a small pair of bellows fastened to a long sharp hand made of a splinter of bamboo. When there was an increase of blood in my hand the air pressed this pointer up. When there was a decrease the pointer fell. "To make permanent record of this increase and decrease was used an interesting little apparatus which only a few days before had come into this country. It is a clock which revolves a small cylinder every minute. On the cylinder is pasted a sheet of smoked paper. The higher the wave on the paper, theoretically, the greater the supply of blood sent to the arm. The greater the flow of blood in the arm, the more the volume of the arm is increased. Now the theory upon which Dr. MacDonald bases his application of this principle to the brain is that the greater the supply of blood in the extremities the less the supply to nourish the brain. Practically the same volume of blood is in the whole body during successive heart-beats. Ergo, the higher the wave on the paper the less the brain nourishment. "The first thing to be accomplished with this instrument was The doctor told me to avoid the recording of my normal line. concentration and to hold my hand perfectly still. The normal line was practically straight, except for the small uniform crests and falls representing the pulse-beat. The pulse-beat, he said, had no significance in the experiment. I was next subjected to pain. Against my temple was pressed a small metallic button having sharp spurs filed on its surface. This was on the end of a rod fitting closely into a hollow wooden handle. Here it was held in place by a spring, and a scale on the outside indicated the pressure with which the button was held against an object. I was told to report the second I felt the slightest perceptible pain. The scale registered 1,900 grams when I said I could feel the least discomfiture. Upon the smoked paper there was a deep curve at this point, indicating that there was a considerable increase of blood in my hand, followed immediately by a great decrease. This wave was deeper than any other on the whole sheet. The indications were that when pain was caused in my temple an abnormal amount of blood rushed to my brain. The pain-maker was next pressed against my right hand until discomfort was again felt. The waves were unusually high, indicating an increase of the blood-supply in my hand. It would seem that the most blood is needed where there is the greatest pain." Having thus described the effect of pain upon the blood-supply, Mr. Watkins next proceeds to justify the title of his article a little more exactly, as follows: "The next experiment required great concentration. I was given a copy of Schopenhauer's works and told to be able to explain a paragraph after reading it carefully. The reading caused almost no movement of the little bamboo-pointer. In other words, there was a stillness in the veins and arteries of my hand, a lack of circulation, an increase of blood in my brain. Nature, therefore, seems to send an extra supply of blood to nourish the thinking organ during great concentration." The last experiment recorded is described in the concluding paragraphs of the article: "A still more interesting instrument was employed for testing the vibration of my tongue. According to Dr. MacDonald, of all members of the body, the tongue is hardest to hold still. A contrivance very much like a dog's muzzle was tied over my mouth by straps around the back of my head. In the end of the conical frame was a small button connected with a drum similar to that upon the hand-trembling apparatus. I was told to extend my tongue until the end of it touched the button. Each movement caused its characteristic wave upon the smoked paper. According to the doctor my tongue was not in a particularly vibratory mood-due doubtless to my sex. "In this interesting laboratory is to be found almost every conceivable invention for measuring conditions of the mind and actions of the body as caused by the mind. Dr. MacDonald can take any person and by aid of his apparatus draw a complete TESTING EFFECTS OF THOUGHT ON BLOOD-SUPPLY OF THE BRAIN. map, showing almost his every temperament. The greater part insane, inebriates, and geniuses. Now it is his purpose to learn to avoid that we may THE German Emperor, it is reported, has had his left arm skiagraphed by the new process. This arm, as every one knows, is useless, and the skiagraph revealed the nature of the malformation. "The result has been submitted to eminent surgeons, and it is stated that they believe a simple operation may give the Emperor partial, if not complete, use of his left hand and arm. THE NAMES OF THE ROENTGEN RAYS AND PICTURES. THE HE nomenclature of Professor Röntgen's discovery is causing scientific men almost as much trouble as the vexed question of the constitution of the newly found form of radiation. Almost every writer on the subject uses his own terms, and no glimpse of uniformity seems yet to be visible. The Electrical World wrote recently to a large number of eminent electricians in this country asking their opinions on the subject, and has received in return a flood of letters. It prints (April 4) several pages of them, and after reading them one is rather more confused than he was at the outset, altho most of them are interesting and not a few instructive. We quote a few below. Professor Pupin, of Columbia, is cautious and non-committal, like a politician who has been asked how he stands on the silver question. He says: "With reference to the naming of the process of photographing by means of the Röntgen radiance, I beg to state I prefer to wait for Professor Röntgen's complete account before suggesting any definite name. Radiograph sounds well; it is not sufficient to distinguish it from ordinary processes of photography, but it will do. It is a much broader term than photograph, and the fact that it is composed of two words, one borrowed from the Latin and the other from Greek, should not worry us very much." Professor Bedell, of Cornell, thus discriminates between various proposed terms, without apparently favoring any of them : "Radiograph is general. A radiograph is a cathodograph if the rays are obtained from a cathode; we may be able to produce them otherwise.. Shadowgraph or skotograph is correct for any shadow pictures (might be with sunlight). Some day we may get cathodographs by reflected cathode rays. Then shadow or skoto would not apply." Professor Fox of the University of New York remarks that not a few of the words used by some authorities have already other significations. He says: "Permit me to call attention to the fact that the words scotograph, scotoscope, sciagraph, sciagraphy, sciography, and skiagraphy are already found in our dictionaries: Thus, quoting from the "Standard Dictionary" : 'Scotograph—An instrument designed to assist the blind in writing or to facilitate writing in the dark. Sciagraph or sciagraphy, etc.-The plan of a building in vertical section, showing the interior structure. Sciagraphy(astr.) The art of finding the time of day or night by observing shadows caused by the sun, moon, or stars; dialing. (Art) — The art of correct shading.' Other dictionaries give similar definitions." Professor Wright of Yale, one of the first in this country to reproduce Röntgen's original experiments, writes as follows: "It seems to me yet too early to settle the nomenclature of the new rays and their effects, as a name ought to be fairly descriptive and clearly discriminate the thing named from other things. Many of the terms which have been suggested, as, for instance, the words radiograph, radiography and their derivations, might be useful as provisional and temporary designations for the new picture and process, it being understood that they are given a special technical sense merely for convenience. The danger would be that they might become fixed by use, and so continued after strictly appropriate terms have been suggested by more complete knowledge of the nature of the phenomena. The words do not differentiate the pictures from those produced by other radiations, as light or heat, which is a defect. The same objection applies to all the names signifying shadow-pictures, and besides the pictures are not mere shadows, but have a perspective effect, from the varying depth of shade dependent upon different thickness, structure, or facility of transmission of the rays. word electrograph more nearly meets the requirements of a name, but that also might be appropriately applied to Nobili's figures, the Lichtenberg figures, and the like. We may yet find that the pictures are a secondary effect produced by luminous rays generated by the electrical action-then what should they be called? For my part, I am still inclined to call them simply cathode pic The tures, since their dependence upon the cathode stream, directly or indirectly, is almost all that is really determined about them as yet; or even Röntgen's pictures, in a general way, and would postpone the selection of fixed terms until something definite is known as to their origin." Quite opposite to this is the opinion of Professor Stevens of the Rensselaer Institute at Troy : "Of the names you enumerate, it seems to me that there are only two that ought to receive much consideration, radiograph and cathodograph. My preference is decidedly for the first of these; for cathodograph is not a safe name until it be established that Röntgen rays are identical with cathode rays. It does not at present seem probable that this identity will be established. But even granting it, the word radiograph would still be applicable. It includes photograph within its scope, but the latter has become so differentiated during the last forty years that no misunderstanding would result from including it in the more general term applied to the newly discovered radiation, which brings about chemical effects similar to those of the so-called 'actinic' radiation." Professor Rowland, of Johns Hopkins, agrees with this view in so far as the rejection of "cathodograph" is concerned, expressing himself quite decidedly on the subject: "As the new photographs have nothing to do with the cathode rays, as we have shown in the laboratory of the Johns Hopkins University, being more nearly related to the anode, all names referring to the cathode should be avoided. Likewise all names referring to other individuals than Röntgen should be rejected. The rays themselves should, according to my view, be simply called Röntgen rays or X rays, and the photographs by means of these rays should be known as Röntgen photographs, thus keeping the name of the discoverer of this wonderful phenomenon ever before the world, as it deserves to be." 46 Mr. Edison leaves the beaten path to advocate a set of names of his own, and apparently will have no others. He says: As the pictures are due to the absorption of Röntgen rays by the silver salts, and as the same fluoresce with the rays, thereby absorbing energy sufficient to cause decomposition, why not call the result fluorograph? Then with the fluoroscope we see and with the fluorograph we record." These views and dozens of others that we have not room to quote leave one with a decided impression that the day for a simple and uniform nomenclature of the subject is still distant. Meanwhile "X ray," Röntgen's original word, altho condemned by most word-makers, flourishes in the newspapers, and has perhaps come to stay. Fossil Truffles.-"The truffle, that queer vegetable which is hunted with trained dogs and pigs, and the best varieties of which are worth their weight in silver in this country, has, it appears, according to the distinguished geologist, E. Dumas, been found in a fossil state," says The National Druggist (April). "In the deposits of lignite at Pont Saint-Esprit (Department of Gard, France) there occur numerous grayish kidney-shaped calcareous nodules. On fracture of these nodules they are found to be of fibrous structure, and to present a very singular form of crystallization-fine needles lying perpendicular to the axis of the kidney. When one is broken into, numerous minute crystals resembling a white powder fall out. This crystalline dust has a strong and characteristic odor of truffles, which persists even after long exposure. The perfume, for such it is, seems identical with that of the best Perigord truffle. Efforts have been made to extract it with oil, alcohol, etc., but the experiments has thus far failed. The name truffite has very appropriately been bestowed on this singular mineral, which, as we have stated, is regarded by distnguished authority as a fossil truffle. That it is of vegetable origin has been definitely settled by microscopical examination. The position of the nodules makes it evident, too, that they were deposited in situ by the action of the water-the sea, which left them lying there, at some indeterminate epoch in time, where they were calcified; but, unlike all other fossil woods, they have retained their perfume, through alll the thousands of years which have elapsed since they grew and flourished beneath some spreading larch-tree. Whence they came, and by what peculiar property or structure they have retained their odor, are mysteries which the chemist and geologist of the future will have to solve." RESTING-POSTURE AS A RACIAL CHAR TH ACTERISTIC. HE modern anthropologist finds an object of study in details often overlooked by the ordinary traveler, and often is able to decide a vexed question of racial affinity by some apparently trivial customary act. In France Dr. F. Regnault has been making special studies of attitude, especially those assumed during repose or rest. Some of his observations with regard to posture. in ancient art have already been translated in THE LITERARY DIGEST. He now contributes to the Revue Encyclopédique an exhaustive examination of attitudes of rest among all the nations of the earth, from which we translate some of the most interesting portions, also reproducing a few of his illustrations: "For us Europeans the attitude of repose is sitting or lying down, and we are apt to believe that there can be no others. Nevertheless numerous races rest with crossed legs like our tailors, others kneel, and still others crouch down. So far as we know no work has been written on this subject. Nevertheless it is important to understand these different attitudes, and to see under what influences they vary. We may thus avoid the error of representing savages seated or lying down like Europeans--an error that was committed at an anthropologic exhibition at Prague, where plaster models of Hottentots and Zulus were shown seated in postures that real Hottentots never assume. Photographs of these impossible groups were sent to numerous anthropological societies.' " direct contact with Europeans, the chiefs sit on chairs, generally of European make.*. . . "The Polynesians have a very different posture of repose. The same They do not crouch, but sit with crossed legs.. custom exists in all the Polynesian islands, Hawaii, New Zealand, etc. "Let us now examine the white races of Europe and America, who sit when they rest. The cross-legged attitude exists no longer except among tailors. Crouching causes fatigue and is resorted to only when it is desired to pick up or gather something. Even when the white man finds no seat he sits on the ground with legs outstretched or half bent, as is shown very frequently in photographs of Russian or Roumanian peasants. We should note, however, among the women great facility in kneeling at work, as when they are washing linen. "Primitive savages crouch down, while their women kneel. The crouching posture, fatiguing for us, is so natural to them that they can sleep in this position. The low-caste Hindus sleep thus, and in the Trocadero Museum an ancient terra-cotta figure shows a crouching Peruvian with closed eyes and head inclined. "A certain degree of civilization brings the position with legs crossed as with our tailors, with many variants, and a higher civilization causes the chair to be adopted. But at first the sitter does not place himself squarely with both legs hanging; he raises one and keeps it on the seat. "Thus the classic attitude of the negro is the crouching one, and that of the negress the kneeling. As for their children, they generally kneel like their mothers, but rarely crouch. Exceptionally, negroes can be seen sitting cross-legged. . fetish-worshiping negro, far from contact with the white, crouches, tho in divers fashions. But the "In different places (Guinea, Kongo, sources of the Nile) they make use of supports 20 to 30 centimeters [7 to 11 inches] high, cut from a piece of wood and of variable form according to the country. Sometimes (in Guinea) it is a round stick supported by a single massive central foot or by three and even four feet. At other times (on the Kongo) it is a square whose sides, raised at right and left, are upborne by four cylindrical legs. In the upper Nile region (Dinkas and Nouers) the seats have four feet, those of the lake region have three; others, lower, have only two large ones on the sides. "The Semites have A PÉGOUAN (INDO-CHINA). a custom opposed to ours; they make no use of chairs. In Mussulman countries the most customary position is that called Turkish, with crossed legs like our tailors. 'Sometimes we may see Arabs resting with their backs against a wall, the legs half bent, in an attitude which is not crouching but which approaches it. In Turkey and Persia the favorite position is that of kneeling. In the Persian salons the invited guests who know the correct thing place themselves on their knees against the wall. The tailor attitude, which both men and women assume, is regarded as uncivil. Chairs are little used, even among the rich; when they are employed one leg is placed on the seat. Turkish fashion, while the other hangs down; "The seats of chiefs are higher and have supports carved to But in certain localities, in more represent human figures. ORANG-TAKUN (MALAY PENINSULA). or, yet again, with one hand they hold one foot as is done in the far East. Crouching is exceptional. "In Egypt the fellahs retain the four postures of their ancestors, the kneeling, the sitting, the crosslegged, and the sitting upon the ground with legs joined. All four date from the eighteenth dynasty. "Let us now study the Hindu and Sino-Japanese races. There also we find other modes of repose. The crouching attitude is reserved, in India, China, and Japan for lower castes. The Chinese and the Man. chus regard it as incorrect. It is also the posture of aboriginal savages, of conquered races, such as the Jakuns and the OrangBattaks of Sumatra. "In resting Hindus and yellow races sit cross-legged on the ground or with one leg bent as in crouching, and the other lying flat. The big joints are very supple, whence an infinite variety of poses. "Sometimes in Siam one leg is placed parallel to and under the |