Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/540

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

which has taught us that squalls and thundershowers constitute depressions in miniature, or at least weak secondary depressions dependent upon a principal depression and formed under its immediate influence.

The old miller, an observer by virtue of his profession and then an observer by the force of circumstances, was obliged to study the wind in all its manifestations of direction and force; he was thus aware that its maximum velocity corresponded with the maximum temperature of the day. Although this rule is not without exceptions, the miller was rarely mistaken. Proof of this is given in the habitual and reassuring response to the farmers who came to the mill in the afternoon, when the wind had fallen so low that no grinding could be done:

"Come to-morrow noon again,
And then I will grind your grain."

Everyday observation has taught us that things really go thus when the wind originates under anticyclonic conditions; in the opposite case, if the wind rises in the evening and gains force during the night, the meteorologist concludes that its origin is cyclonic, and a change of weather is probable.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from Ciel et Terre.

In a paper on the Inheritance of Acquired Characters, Prof. A. S. Packard assumes that "all progress in humanity appears to be due, not only to our maintaining the present intellectual environment, with the manifold and many-sided stimuli of our present social structure, but also to the unceasing efforts of the leaders in advanced thought in many different departments of training and effort to open up new fields of research in natural, physical, and mental science and their applications, to gain new and higher points of view in sociology and morals as well as in statecraft, and, in short, to perfect and hasten the development of the ideal man. Unless this progress, which is a historical fact, has been due, not only at the outset, but all through human history thus far, to this principle of the inheritance of mental traits, causing the intellectual efforts of one generation to pass down and thus to have finally a cumulative effect, how could there be any progress in human society? On the one hand, let us imagine a cessation of the operation of this principle. Suppose all the forces and stimuli of modern society to be removed, and the human organism to live like blind beetles in a cave, or a savage tribe isolated in the midst of an otherwise uninhabited continent, with a total uniformity of conditions, physical, social, and moral, the effects of disuse would.at once set in. Heredity without this vivifying principle of cumulative transmission, as it might be called, would be retrogressive in its action, and the race would by reversion return to the status of prehistoric times. Or, on the other hand, if the present intellectual environment were maintained without the cumulative action of the principle of inheritance of acquired characters, the social organism would become stagnant, and the race would be semi-fossilized, or in a state of arrested development, like the Chinese."

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