place, the block when released-i. e., by the melting of the ice— from the power that transported and placed it must have slid down and found a resting-place at the bottom of what is now a contiguous salt marsh; and, third, the circumstance that all the edges and angles of the block are as sharp and free from abrasion -which last is also true of its entire surface-as if it were but recently lifted from its original bed by the most modern and careful system of quarrying. It could not obviously, therefore, in its process of transportation have been rolled or tumbled about to any great extent; which conclusion in turn suggests that its movement after the first displacement was a lifting up to its present elevation, and that it was not subsequently transported to any great distance laterally. The extension of the ledge on which this great block rests having been largely broken up and removed through its use as a quarry, what might have been evidence confirmatory of this effect is now no longer obtainable. That it would have been perfectly practicable, with the requisite labor and machinery and large expenditure, to have quarried this block, and then have lifted it up and blocked it in its present position, is not to be denied; but the idea that any such thing has been done, and for no practical purpose, is perfectly untenable. The surrounding country is very thinly populated, and the rock was in position long before any quarry (for the obtaining of rough stone for railroad construction) was worked in any immediate vicinity.

To travelers on the New London and New Haven Railroad this testimonial of the forces operative in a former geological age, by reason of its close proximity to the track, is clearly discernible on the right-hand side going west and the left-hand going east, and constitutes a most striking and picturesque object. Its obvious novelty, which has thus far undoubtedly saved it from destruction or displacement at the hands of workmen and vandals, may, it is to be hoped, continue to constitute its protection in the future, although as an object of attraction and interest to tourists and scientific men it is eminently worthy of care by the managers of the railroad company.

Figs. 5 and 6 are photographic reproductions of a huge bowlder, curiously disrupted on the land of Mr. Edward Atkinson, at Mattapoisett, on Buzzard's Bay, Mass., and having the following dimensions: Maximum height, 42 feet; measurement through the middle of the passage between the two fragments, from one side to the other in a straight line, 36 feet: average width of the crack between the two fragments at the level of the ground, 3 feet; present surface area of the detached fragment, which has in part been quarried away, 462 feet.

To the trained geologist, the foregoing and all similar accounts

and representations of bowlders possess but little interest other than what pertains to peculiarities of size, shape, and location; while the agencies mainly concerned in the formation, movement, and distribution of the bowlder, as well as of the ordinary pebble, which is a miniature bowlder, have long ceased to be matters of controversy. With those not versed, however, in geological evidence and reasoning, the case is far different. To most of such, the attributing of the phenomena under consideration to the motor power of ice seems so fanciful and unnatural that the agency of the Indian (as has come within the experience of the writer) has appeared more reasonable. But if any one thus doubting will but acquaint himself with the present condition of Greenland, where we have a continental area covered with a sheet of ice of immense thickness-a mile or more, doubtless, in many places-continually accumulating through almost constant atmospheric precipitations, and moving, through the weight and pressure of such increments of snow and ice, with almost irresisti ble force from the center of such continent to its sea or coast line, and then in imagination transfer and reproduce such conditions (which are undoubted actualities) over the whole of the northern United States and Canada, he will be abundantly satisfied that the most striking of bowlder phenomena constitute but a very small measure of the forces that were concerned in their production and were concurrently exerted to modify the earth's surface -even to the extent of removing mountains.

It will also widen the sphere of interest in this subject to refer to the humbler but at the same time most instructive memorials of the Glacial period, which are, as it were, associated with the bowlders, and help to conceal the barrenness and desolation of the "drift"; namely, the pretty flowering plants like the "dandelion" and the "trailing arbutus," and others, which are believed to have come down in the Glacial period from their natural habitat in the far north to our present temperate zone, and to have remained, after the disappearance of the ice, with the bowlders as if to keep them company. Recent explorers of Greenland tell us that wherever in little sheltered nooks upon its dreary coast the ice and frost relax sufficiently in the brief summer to admit of any vegetation, these plants grow and flower most luxuriantly, while in their foreign homes they seem, as every one knows, to choose those times and temperatures for blooming and fruition-i. e., in the early spring-which are most in accordance with the conditions of their origin and primal existence; thus apparently reasserting their feræ naturæ as did the old vikings when associated with the more delicate types of southern latitudes.

TAIL-LIKE FORMATIONS IN MEN.

AFTER THE RESEARCHES OF DR. BARTELS, PROF. ECKER, DR. MOHNIKE, DR. ORNSTEIN, AND OTHERS.

TR

RADITIONS of tailed men are very old and wide-spread. Tailed races are told of in many countries, whose home is, however, usually placed in some little-known region; and the stories of individuals who had tails can hardly be counted. A number of legends on the subject have been collected by Mr. S. Baring-Gould, and published in his Curious Myths of the Middle Ages. This author himself was brought up in the belief that all Cornishmen had tails, and was not undeceived till a good Cornish bookseller, with whom he formed a warm friendship, assured him that this was not the case; after which he satisfied himself that the man had sat his tail off; and his nurse informed him that that was what happened to men of sedentary habits.

Certain men of Kent were said to have had tails inflicted upon them in punishment for their insults to St. Thomas à Becket. The story runs that when the saint came to Stroud on the Medway, the inhabitants of the place, being eager to show some mark of contumely to him in his disgrace, did not scruple to cut off the tail of the horse on which he was riding; and for this, according to Polydor Vergil," it so happened, by the will of God, that all the offspring born from the men who had done this thing were born with tails like brute animals. But this mark of infamy, which formerly was everywhere notorious, has disappeared with the extinction of the race whose fathers perpetrated the deed." The story seems to have been applied, with variations, to other Englishmen, now here, now there, so that John Bale complained, in the time of Edward VI, "that an Englyshman now can not travayle in another land by way of marchandyse or any other honest occupyinge, but it is most contumeliously thrown in his tethe that all Englyshmen have tails."

A Polish writer tells of a witch who transformed a bridal company, stepping over a girdle of human skin which she had laid in the doorway, into wolves. She afterward, by throwing dresses of fur over them, gave them their human forms; but the bridegroom's dress was not long enough to cover his tail, and he kept it; whence it became hereditary in his family. John Struys, a Dutch traveler, who visited Formosa in the seventeenth century, relates that a member of his party got separated from the rest and was mangled and killed by a wild man, who was afterward caught and tied up for execution, when, says the traveler, "I beheld what I had never thought to see. He had a tail more than a foot long, covered with red hair, and very like that of a cow. When he saw