through the Main Island gives us the other side of the picture to that seen in such well-known centres as Tokio, Yokohama, and Kioto-by far the finest city in Japan, the home of art and culture, according to Miss Bird. She gives very sad and sometimes very disgusting pictures of the condition of the people in some parts of the country through which she passed with her amusing and clever guide Ito. In one district the villages, she tells us, have reached the lowest abyss of filthiness; still she found the people here, as everywhere else, courteous, kindly, industrious, and free from gross crimes. Indeed, although naturally an object of intense interest wherever she went, and the centre of hundreds and sometimes thousands of eyes, she had rarely if ever to complain of discourtesy. Everywhere everybody was courteous and obliging, and except in the open towns, rarely was an attempt at extortion made. While part of the centre of the island is dreary enough, much of it is of the rarest beauty, with its fine mountains, rich woods, and rapid deeply cutting rivers. At Niigata and other open ports she notes with satisfaction the rapid spread of European medical treatment under the care of the medical missionaries, some of whom are doing excellent work. At Niigata, especially Dr. Palm's influence is wide-spread, and thousands of people have been weaned from the Chinese system of treatment to that offered by Dr. Palm and his numerous native assistants, most of them men of the best type, who have established among themselves a society similar to some of the medical societies which meet in London and elsewhere. At Niigata Miss Bird made the acquaintance of an interesting bookseller. "This bookseller, who was remarkably communicative, and seems very intelligent, tells me that there is not the same demand now as formerly for native works on the history, geography, and botany of Japan. He showed me a folio work on botany in four thick volumes, which gives root, stalk, leaf, flower, and seed of every plant delineated (and there are 400), drawn with the most painstaking botanical accuracy, and admirable fidelity to colour. This is a book of very great value and interest. He has translations of some of the works of Huxley, Darwin, and Herbert Spencer, which, he says, are bought by the young men attending the higher school. The Origin of Species' has the largest sale. This man asked me many questions about the publishing and bookselling trade in England, and Ito acquitted himself admirably as an interpreter. He had not a single book on any subject connected with religion." In a letter from Kaminoyama, to the north-east of Niigata, she gives a graphic picture of the incongruities to be met with in the present transition state of the country:-"We rode for four hours through these beautiful villages on a road four feet wide, and then, to my surprise, after ferrying a river, emerged at Tsukuno upon what appears on the map as a secondary road, but which is in reality a main road twenty-five feet wide, well kept, trenched on both sides, and with a line of telegraph poles along it. It was a new world at once. The road for many miles was thronged with well-dressed footpassengers, kurumas, pack-horses, and waggons either with solid wheels, or wheels with spokes but no tires. It is a capital carriage-road, but without carriages. In such civilised circumstances it was curious to see two or four brown-skinned men pulling the carts, and quite often a man and his wife-the man unclothed, and the woman unclothed to her waist-doing the same. Also it struck me as incongruous to see telegraph wires above, and below, men whose only clothing consisted of a sun-hat and fan; while children with books and slates were returning from school, conning their lessons." As far north as Kubota, quite 200 miles north of Niigata, Miss Bird found a normal school established, with FIG. 1.-Ainos of Yezo. twenty-five teachers and 700 pupils between the ages of six and twenty. "They teach reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, political economy after John Stuart Mill, chemistry, botany, a course of natural science, geometry, and mensuration." Indeed she found evidence. everywhere of the schoolmaster being abroad all over the country, and of the purpose of the Government to make education, after the models of Europe and America, universal and compulsory; and among the educated classes, the familiarity with the works of the most advanced English scientific writers-Huxley, Darwin, and Spencer especially-struck her greatly. To the ethnologist Miss Bird's notes on the Ainos, the and seeing and sharing the daily life of complete savages who go on with their ordinary occupations just as if I were not among them. I found yesterday a most fatiguing and over-exciting day, as everything was new and interesting, even the extracting from men who have few if any ideas in common with me, all I could extract concerning their religions and customs, and that through an interpreter. I got up at six this morning to write out my notes, and have been writing for five hours, and there is shortly the prospect of another savage séance. The distractions, as you imagine, are many. At this moment a savage is taking a cup of saké by the fire in the centre of the floor. He salutes me by extending his hands and waving them towards his face, and then dips a rod in the saké, and makes six libations to the god-an upright piece of wood with a fringe of shavings planted in the floor of the room. Then he waves the cup several times towards himself, makes other libations to the fire, and drinks. Ten other men and women are sitting along each side of the firehole, the chief's wife is cooking, the men are apathetically contemplating the preparation of their food; and the other women, who are never idle, are splitting the bark of which they make their clothes. I occupy the guest seat-a raised platform at one end of the fire, with the skin of a black bear thrown over it." These Ainos drink enormous quantities of saké, the national liquor of Japan; they can drink three times as much as a Japanese without being affected by it, and the drinking of it is with them the chief act of worship to the rude gods, if gods they be, which are stuck up in various parts of their huts. Here is another picture : "About nine the stew was ready, and the women ladled it into lacquer bowls with wooden spoons. The men were served first, but all ate together. Afterwards sake, their curse, was poured into lacquer bowls, and across each bowl a finely-carved 'saké-stick' was laid. These sticks are very highly prized. The bowls were waved several time with an inward motion, then each man took his stick and, dipping it into the saké, made six libations to the fire, and several to the 'god,' a wooden post, with a quantity of spiral white shavings falling from near the top." The intense fondness of the Ainos for their children is a marked feature in their character, and the instantaneous and implicit obedience of the latter to their parents is as great as with the Japanese themselves. Their hospitality is genuine, universal, and almost profuse. "In every house the same honour was paid to a guest. This seems a savage virtue which is not strong enough to survive much contact with civilisation. Before I entered one lodge the woman brought several of the finer mats, and arranged them as a pathway for me to walk to the fire upon. They will not accept anything for lodging or for anything that they give, so I was anxious to help them by buying some of their handiwork, but found even this a difficult matter. They were very anxious to give, but when I desired to buy they said they did not wish to part with their things. I wanted what they had in actual use, such as a tobacco-box and pipe-sheath, and knives with carved handles and scabbards, and for three of these I offered 2 dollars. They said they did not care to sell them, but in the evening they came saying they were not worth more than I dollar 10 cents, and they would sell them for that; and I could not get them to take more. They said it was 'not their custom.'' more hair on their bodies than those in the interior, and in some other respects differed in appearance, a difference probably to be accounted for by their mode of life and their surroundings. The Aino garments are often exceedingly handsome, being decorated with "geometrical" patterns in which the Greek fret takes part, in coarse blue cotton, braided most dexterously with scarlet and white thread. The modesty of the women is very remarkable, sometimes almost excessive even to European notions; nor do they seem to be the unmitigated drudges that most savage women are. The great hero of the Ainos is Yoshitsuné, who is also the most popular hero of Japanese history; the Ainos worship him, and Miss Bird was permitted to visit his shrine on a hill near Biratori, the Aino village at which she spent most of her He lived in the twelfth century, and was the brother of the Shôgun of the time, whose jealousy, according to some, compelled him to take refuge in Yezo. "None believe this more firmly than the Ainos themselves, who assert that he taught their fathers the arts of civilisation, with letters and numbers, and gave them righteous laws, and he is worshipped by many of them under a name which signifies Master of the Law. I have been told by old men in Biratori, Usu, and Lebungé, that a later Japanese conqueror carried away the books in which the arts were written, and that since his time the arts themselves have been lost, and the Ainos have fallen into their present condition! On asking why the Ainos do not make vessels of iron and clay as well as knives and spears, the invariable answer is, The Japanese took away the books.'" This, combined with some other things which Miss Bird tells us of these Ainos, makes it seem quite possible that they are now a degenerate remnant of a people who formerly were comparatively cultured, and who may possibly have had "books" which the Japanese, their conquerors and masters, "took away." These strange people are certainly worthy of further study. The illustrations we are able to give, by the kindness of Mr. Murray, will give the reader some idea of their appearance and habits. We strongly recommend the reader to go to Miss Bird's volumes for further information of what she saw and heard while sojourning among them. All that Miss Bird tells us of her visit to the Ainos is well worth quoting; but we have space for only one more quotation, and that with reference to their physique :"After the yellow skins, the stiff horse hair, the feeble eyelids, the elongated eyes, the sloping eyebrows, the flat noses, the sunken chests, the Mongolian features, the puny physique, the shaky walk of the men, the restricted totter of the women, and the general impression of degeneracy conveyed by the appearance of the Japanese, the Ainos make a very singular impression. All but two or three that I have seen are the most ferocious-looking of savages, with a physique vigorous enough for carrying out the most ferocious intentions, but as soon as they speak the countenance brightens into a smile as gentle as that of a woman, something which can never be forgotten. The men are about the middle height, broad-time. chested, broad-shouldered, 'thick-set,' very strongly built, the arms and legs short, thick, and muscular, the hands and feet large. The bodies, and specially the limbs, of many are covered with short bristly hair. I have seen two boys whose backs are covered with fur as fine and soft as that of a cat. The heads and faces are very striking. The foreheads are very high, broad, and prominent, and at first sight give one the impression of an unusual capacity for intellectual development; the ears are small and set low; the noses are straight, but short, and broad at the nostrils; the mouths are wide, but well formed; and the lips rarely show a tendency to fulness. The neck is short, the cranium rounded, the cheek-bones low, and the lower part of the face is small as compared with the upper, the peculiarity called a 'jowl' being unknown. The eyebrows are full, and form a straight line nearly across the face. The eyes are large, tolerably deeply set, and very beautiful, the colour a rich liquid brown, the expression singularly soft, and the eyelashes long, silky, and abundant. The skin has the Italian olive tint, but in most cases is thin, and light enough to show the changes of colour in the cheek. The teeth are small, regular, and very white; the incisors and 'eye teeth' are not disproportionately large, as is usually the case among the Japanese; there is no tendency towards prognathism; and the fold of integument which conceals the upper eyelids of the Japanese is never to be met with. The features, expression, and aspect are European rather than Asiatic. "The 'ferocious savagery' of the appearance of the men is produced by a profusion of thick soft black hair, divided in the middle, and falling in heavy masses nearly to the shoulders. Out of doors it is kept from falling over the face by a fillet round the brow. The beards are equally profuse, quite magnificent, and generally wavy, and in the case of the old men they give a truly patriarchal and venerable aspect, in spite of the yellow tinge produced by smoke and want of cleanliness. The savage look produced by the masses of hair and beard, and the thick eyebrows, is mitigated by the softness in the dreamy brown eyes, and is altogether obliterated by the exceeding sweetness of the smile, which belongs in greater or less degree to all the rougher sex. "I have measured the height of thirty of the adult men of this village, and it ranges from 5 feet 4 inches to 5 feet 6 inches. The circumference of the heads averages 22'1 inches, and the arc, from ear to ear, 13 inches. According to Mr. Davies the average weight of the Aino adult masculine brain, ascertained by measurement of Aino skulls, is 45'90 ounces avoirdupois, a brain weight said to exceed that of all the races, Hindoo and Mussulman, on the Indian plains, and that of the aboriginal races of India and Ceylon, and is only paralleled by that of the races of the Himalayas, the Siamese, and the Chinese Burmese. Mr. Davies says, further, that it exceeds the mean brain weight of Asiatic races in general. Yet with all this the Ainos are a stupid people !" The coast Ainos, Miss Bird tells us, she found had Again we commend these two works to all who desire to get, in comparatively short space, a very complete view of the past history and present condition of Japan. BELL'S PHOTOPHONE He has BY the courtesy of Prof. Graham Bell we are at length Our readers are already aware that the object of the photophone is the transmission of sounds both musical and vocal to a distance by the agency of a beam of light of varying intensity; and that the first successful attempts made by Prof. Bell and his co-labourer, Mr. Sumner Tainter, were based upon the known property of the element selenium, the electric resistance of which varies with the degree of illumination to which it is exposed. Hence, given a transmitting instrument such as a flexible mirror by which the vibrations of a sound could throw into vibration a beam of light, a receiver consisting of sensitive selenium forming part of an electric circuit with a battery and a telephone should suffice to translate the varying intensities of light into corresponding varying intensities of electric current, and finally into vibrations of the telephone disk audible once more as sound. This funda mental conception dates from 1878, when in lecturing before the Royal Institution Prof. Bell announced the possibility of hearing a shadow fall upon a piece of selenium included in a telephone circuit. The photo phone, however, outgrew the particular electrical combination that suggested it; for not the least of the remarkable points in this research is the discovery that audible vibrations are set up in thin disks of almost every kind of Sie 14 to a FIG. 1.-The Musical Telephone. rapid abrupt interruptions of the electric current; while the articulating telephone of Graham Bell was able to transmit speech, since by its essential construction it was able to send undulating currents to the distant receiving station. We may in like manner classify the forms of photophone under two heads, as (1) articulating photophones, and (2) musical photophones; the former being able to transmit speech because they work by beams of light whose intensity can vary in undulatory fluctuations, like those of vocal tones; the latter being able to transmit simple musical tones only, since they work by mere interruptions of a fixed beam of light. Up to the present time, Prof. Bell informs us, the simple receiving disk of ebonite or hard rubber has only served for a musical photophone: the reproduction of the tones of the voice by its means has not yet been demonstrated in practice-at least to his satisfaction. For while it produces unmistakable musical tones by the direct action of an intermittent light, in the experiments made hitherto with articulate speech the instruments have by necessity been so near to one another that the voice of the speaker was audible through the air. Under these circumstances it is extremely difficult to say whether the sounds that are heard proceed from the diaphragm, or whether they merely came through the air to the ear, and if they come from the diaphragm, whether they are really the result of the varying light, and not mere sound vibrations taken up by the disk from the speaker's voice crossing the air. Prof. Bell hopes soon to settle this point, however, by an appeal to experiment on a larger scale with the receiving and transmitting instruments at greater distances apart, and with glass windows in between to shut off all sounds. In Fig. I we illustrate the simple musical photophone of Bell and Tainter. It might perhaps be described without injustice as an optical siren, producing sounds from intermittent beams of light, as the siren of Cagniard de Latour produces them from intermittent puffs of air. A beam of light from the sun or from a powerful artificial source, such as an electric lamp, falls upon a mirror M, and is reflected through a large lens L, which concentrates the rays to a focus. Just at the focus is interposed a disk or concave, the degree of its alteration in form varying pierced with holes-forty or so in number-arranged in a with every vibration of the voice. Suppose at any instant circle. This disk can be rotated so that the light is inter-say by a sudden displacement such as takes place when rupted from one to five or six hundred times per second. the letter "T" is sounded-the disk becomes considerably The intermittent beam thus produced is received by a convex; the beam of light will no longer be concentrated lens T, or a pair of lenses upon a common support, whose upon the receiving instrument, but will cover a much function is to render the beam once more parallel, or to wider area. Of the whole beam, therefore, only a relaconcentrate it upon the disk of ebonite placed immediately tively small portion will fall upon the receiving instrubehind, but not quite touching them. From the disk a ment; and it is therefore possible to conceive that, if tube conveys the sounds to the ear. We may remind perfectly adjusted, the illumination should be proporour readers here that this apparent direct conversion of tional to the displacement of the disk, and vary therefore light into sound takes place, as Prof. Bell found, in disks with every vibration with the utmost fidelity. of all kinds of substances-hard rubber, zinc, antimony, selenium, ivory, parchment, wood, and that he has lately found that disks of carbon and of thin glass, which he formerly thought exceptions to this property, do also behave in the same way. We may perhaps remark without impropriety that it is extremely improbable that the apparent conversion of light into sound is by any means a direct process. It is well known that luminiferous rays, when absorbed at the surface of a medium, warm that surface slightly, and must therefore produce physical and molecular actions in its structure. If it can be shown that this warming effect and an intermediate cooling by conduction can go on with such excessive rapidity that beams of light falling on the surface at intervals less than the hundredth of a second apart produce a discontinuous molecular action of alternate expansion and contraction, then the inysterious property of matter revealed by these experiments is accounted for. However this may be, the musical photophone, as represented in Fig. 1, produces very distinct sounds, of whose existence and dependence for their production on the light the listener may satisfy himself by cutting off the light at any moment with the little opaque disk fixed on the end of the little lever just in front of the holes in disk R, and which can be worked by a Morse key like a telegraph instrument, thus producing at will alternate sounds and silences. With this musical photophone sounds have been carried by an interrupted beam of light for a distance exceeding a mile; there appears, indeed, no reason why a much greater range might not be attained. The articulating photophone is that to which hitherto public attention has been most largely directed, and in which a selenium receiver plays a part. Fig. 2 gives in diagram form the essential parts of this arrangement. A mirror M reflects a beam of light as before through a lens L, and (if desired for the purpose of experimentally cutting off the heat-rays) through a cell A containing alum-water, and casts it upon the transmitter B. This transmitter, shown again in Fig. 5, consists of a little disk of thin glass, silvered on the front, of about the size of the disk of an ordinary telephone, and mounted in a frame, with a flexible india-rubber tube about sixteen inches long leading to a mouthpiece. A second lens R, interposed in the beam of light after reflection at the little mirror, renders the rays approximately parallel. The general view of the transmitting apparatus given in Fig. 5 enables the relative sizes and positions of the various parts (minus the alum-cell which is omitted) to be seen. The screw adjustments of the support serve to direct the beam of light in the desired direction. It may be well to explain once for all how the vibrations of the voice can affect the intensity of the reflected beam far away. The lenses are so adjusted that when the mirror B is flat (ie. when not vibrating) the beam projected from the apparatus to the distant station shall be nearly focussed on the receiving instrument. Owing to the optical difficulties of the problem it is impossible that the focussing can be more than approximate. Now, matters being thus arranged, when the speaker's voice is thrown against the disk B it is set into vibration, becomes alternately bulged out and in, and made slightly convex The receiver of the articulating photophone is shown on the right-hand side of the diagram (Fig. 2) sketched by Prof. Bell. A mirror of parabolic curve CC serves to concentrate the beam and to reflect it down upon the selenium cell s, which is included in the circuit of a battery P along with a pair of telephones T and T. Here again a general view like that given in Fig. 6 facilitates the comprehension of the principal parts of the apparatus. The sensitive selenium cell is seen in the hollow of the parabolic mirror which is mounted so as to be turned in any desired direction. The battery standing upon the ground furnishes a current which flows through the selenium cell and through the telephones. When a ray of light falls on the selenium-be it for ever so short an instant-the selenium increases in conductivity, and instantly transmits a larger amount of eléctricity, and the observer with the telephones hears the ray, or the succession of them ;-hears FIG. 4.-Diagram to show the action of the Selenium Receiver. indeed their every fluctuation in a series of sounds which, the construction of such a cell. Prof. Bell has also used |