Professor Stanley Hall from the work of Professor Morselli, of Milan :

The regularity of increase in the number of suicides is much greater than the increase of population. The larger the town the greater the annual increase. The yearly variations depend on social and economic changes, on the weather, and on natural phenomena. The two zones of greatest frequency of suicide are the centre of the German population and Northern France. From these in all directions the frequency of suicide decreases, like waves from a stone thrown in the water. This geographical scheme repeats itself on a smaller scale for other smaller centres, the great cities exhibiting, of course, the largest percentage, these latter and race being the chief factors. Spring, summer, winter, autumn, is the series which represents decreasing numbers of suicides, June being the month of most and December of least frequence.

In Italy about

Suicides increase with culture and civilization. twice as many suicides occur in cities as in the country. The state of religious consciousness has a great influence on the tendency to suicide, which is strongest among Protestants; then follow Catholics, Jews, Mohammedans, fetish-worshipers, in decreasing series. Men are about four times as likely to commit suicide as women, but the percentage of women to men is greater in spring and summer, and of men to women in fall and winter. Each race and nation

has its peculiarities in this regard.

Liability to suicide increases regularly with age, and reaches its maximum with women earlier than with men, being great for both about the involuntary period. Unmarried life, especially the states of widowhood and divorce, favors suicide, family life tending strongly against it, and widowers are more exposed to it than widows. Children are one of the greatest protections, especially for women. The well-to-do classes are more exposed than the poor. Among vocations, soldiers, and of them the older subordinate officers, exhibit the highest percentage. The means of suicide vary regularly with the season of the year, race, climate, and culture. In Russia, Norway, and Prussia hanging is decreasing and drowning increasing. In Denmark, Belgium, Holland, and France the reverse tendency is exhibited. Death by fire-arms is steadily increasing; by charcoal fumes, decreasing in France and increasing in the west of Europe, especially in great cities. In northern lands hanging is the mode of death in three-fourths of all cases, while in the south drowning is

more the fashion. Italians often precipitate themselves from high places and Anglo-Saxons often stab themselves. More painful and uncertain modes of death are rapidly declining. In Italy men choose fire-arms, women drowning. In Austria men prefer hanging. Unmarried women and servants resort to poison, and in each land each age has its preferred mode of death.

Suicide is largely an index of social misery, and corrective inflences are to be sought in the reform of moral ideas and a better equilibrium between human needs and the means of development.

LINGUISTIC MAP.-At the 130th meeting of the Anthropological Society, January 3, 1888, Mr. Henshaw exhibited a linguistic map of that portion of North America to the north of Mexico, including the peninsula of Lower California, and read a paper in explanation of it. He stated that the total number of distinct linguistic families represented on the map is sixty.

He summarized the more important deductions derivable from the data upon which the map was based, or that are suggested by it, as follows:

(1.) That the North American Indian tribes, instead of speaking related dialects which have originated in a single, parent language, in reality speak many languages belonging to very distinct families which have no apparent unity of origin.

(2.) That the Indian population of North America was greatly exaggerated by early writers and instead of being large was in reality comparatively small, and furthermore that the population had nowhere augmented sufficiently, except possibly in California, to press upon the food supply.

(3.) That although representing a small population the numerous tribes had overspread North America and had possessed themselves of all the territory, which almost everywhere was owned in common by the tribe.

(4.) That prior to the advent of the European the tribes were probably nearly in a state of equilibrium and were in the main sedentary, and not nomadic, and that those tribes which can be said with propriety to have been nomadic became so only after the advent of the European and largely as the direct result of the acquisition of the horse and the introduction of fire-arms.

(5.) That, while agriculture was general among the tribes of the

eastern United States and while it was spreading among western tribes, it nowhere was practiced sufficiently to emancipate the Indian wholly from the hunter state.

DISTRIBUTION OF THE FIRE-SYRINGE.-Some years ago it was discovered that air and other gases give up a large amount of heat when forced into smaller compass. It was found that tinder could be ignited by means of a device made on this principle, and the invention was called a "Pyrophorus," or by the less classical name of fire-syringe. It is made as follows: A tube of glass closed at one end is fitted tightly with a plunger. The plunger, to the end of which is fastened a piece of tinder or a pledget of cotton dipped in bisulphide of carbon, is inserted into the tube and driven down by a sharp blow, then quickly withdrawn, when it will be found that the tinder is glowing.

This invention was put on the market as a method of getting fire prior to 1832, when friction-matches were invented, and it entered into competition with flint and steel, the phosphorus bottle, and the various pyrogens of that period. I am told that a pyrophorus made of pewter was in use in parts of New England many years ago, but no doubt it was regarded more as a curious toy than as a useful means of generating fire.

Seemingly anomalous is the fact that the head-hunting Saribus Dyaks of Borneo use this mechanical toy for the purpose of procuring fire (Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Gt. Brit. and Ireland, XV, p. 426). The Dyak appliance is a small brass tube lined with lead; they say no other metal will produce the effect. A wooden plunger fits the tube tightly, the end of which is hollowed out for the reception of a piece of tinder.

The Kakhyens of Burmah also use the fire-syringe, made of a solid cylinder of buffalo horn, with a central bore three-sixteenths of an inch in diameter and three inches deep burned into it. The piston is made of iron-wood (Scientific American Supp. 508, p. 8107).

It would, probably, be unsafe to class this very unusual mode of getting fire as a barbarous invention without further investigation and its discovery in other regions. It should be stated that the most common method of obtaining fire, both in Burmah and Borneo, which may be characterized as the Malay method, is by rubbing a stick in a groove in another stick.

The use of the pyrophorus in Burmah is another link in the chain of evidence connecting the Malays of the islands and the inhabitants of the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Col. Henry Yule argues for this connection and cites the distribution of the double bellows as one of the proofs (Jour. Anthrop. Inst. Gt. Britain, IX, p. 290). Evidence has been accumulating on this point for some years, and it may now be considered as proven that Indo-China was a center whence peoples dispersed over the innumerable islands of the Pacific. WALTER HOUGH.

WOMAN'S SHARE IN EARLY CULTURE.-In a Saturday Lecture, delivered in the National Museum on April 28, Professor Mason took the ground that Mr. Spencer's division of culture into militancy and industrialism would apply even more aptly to sex occupations. Man's work from the first was essentially militant; woman's work, industrial. Men were first and are now soldiers, miners, hunters, fishermen, woodmen, &c., going to Nature and seizing her productions. Women were the conservers of the results of men's labors, and were the first tanners, shoemakers, clothiers, toymakers, milliners, architects, upholsterers, cooks, common carriers, agriculturists, millers, spinners, weavers, potters, decorative artists, &c. Indeed they seem to have been the inventors of the majority of our peaceful elaborative industries.

The distinction of militancy and industrialism was traced through human occupations, languages, social structure, and religions.

With respect to language it was maintained that women were the inventors of the terms relating to their own arts, and, since their work was expended on material furnished by men and upon comforts demanded by them, the woman's vocabulary was, in all probability, richer than that of man.

Socially, her share in romantic love, in establishing the gentile system, in the development of the highest virtues through prolonged maturity, her natural rôle of conserver, and her personal influence in cases well authenticated by travelers elevate her far above the conditions of drudge and slave in which she is often painted.

The natural anthropomorphic tendencies in religion were shown to have followed woman to the spirit world in her conception of it and in man's conception of the women dwelling there. She ap

pears as mother, lover, Fates, dispenser of slain game, of corn, of home comforts, &c., just as she was in her life on earth.

The primitive conception of a Creator of all things would seem to have originated in the mind of women at their occupations or to have been suggested by men observing women at work. The potter fashioning clay, the, primitive architect uprearing her lodge on poles, the weaver arranging the warp and weft of things-these are the metaphors that crowd all mythologies and indicate to us how the Divine Maker first became conceivable to mankind.

THOMAS HAMPSON.

The announcement is made with profound sorrow of the death of Mr. Thomas Hampson, the late editor of this journal, at Washington, on the 23d of last April. An extended account of his life and services will soon appear in the publication of the U. S. Geological Survey with which he had been connected for several years. Meanwhile it is proper to present to our readers the following resolutions adopted at the meeting of the Anthropological Society of Washington held May 1, 1888:

WHEREAS our friend and fellow-member THOMAS HAMPSON has ended his career among us in the early prime of life, and whereas it is fitting that expression be given to our feelings upon this sorrowful event: Therefore,

Resolved, That in his death the community sustains a severe loss; that the Government loses an energetic, zealous, and faithful servant; that the Society, in its twofold loss of counselor and editor of its journal, loses one whose ability, learning, skill, and tact it will be difficult to replace.

Resolved, That his death is regarded as a personal loss to the members of this Society, who esteemed him as a warm-hearted man, a candid, magnanimous friend, and a most valuable coadjutor and adviser.

Resolved, That our sympathy and condolence are hereby proffered to the widow and family of the deceased, and that we unite with them in mourning his untimely death.