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fifteen inches wide, and about as thick as pie crust. These are baked either on beds of hot pebbles or in the regulation oven, which consists of a hole in the ground three or four feet deep and as many in diameter, lined with hardened clay, and narrowing toward the top, a fire being built in the bottom to heat the clay. The baker spreads his sheets of dough on a sort of pillow, and, dextrously seizing it by a handle on the bottom, bends down into the oven and spats the dough against the side, where it sticks and is baked in a few minutes. The sheets of bread are pulled out of the oven by means of a hook and hung on the walls of the shop to cool. The bread is sold by weight, the price being about one and one-half cents per pound, and is delivered without wrapping paper.

The people roll up their sheets of bread and carry them home under their arms as if they were packages of brown paper. It is literally whole-wheat bread, and though it contains no salt, tastes better than it looks.

There are two kinds of butter, one made from buffaloes' milk and the other from that of cows. The former is white and tastes like tallow, but the latter cannot be said to be as attractive or any more palatable, for the people churn it in a goat skin with the hair inside.

Each farmer seems to prepare his own grain for grinding. grain for grinding. After the harvesting, the grain is spread out two or three feet deep on a spot of specially hardened ground, and oxen and buffaloes are driven around over it until the kernels are broken out of the heads. In some cases the threshing instrument is a

heavy oblong board, like one of our stone sledges, the bottom of which has been armed with pieces of sharp rock. The drivers of these contrivances were usually women, and sometimes they were nursing their babies as they stood or sat upon the threshing-board. When the grain has all fallen to the ground, the straw is removed and the wheat is winnowed by throwing it up into the air by means of long-handled wooden

shovels, thus allowing the wind to blow away the chaff. Then the grain is gathered up and spread out on skins by the roadside or in any other convenient place to dry before being stored or taken to the mill for grinding. The millennium evidently has not come to these people, for, contrary to the Scripture injunction, they muzzle the ox which is treading out the grain by tying wisps of straw about his mouth.

JOSEPH LE CONTE

I

N the death of Professor Le Conte, science loses one of her most honored exponents, the country one of her most exemplary citizens.

Joseph Le Conte was born in Georgia, February 26, 1823. He graduated from the university of his native state as A. B. in 1841, and from the College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York as M. D. in 1845. After some years of medical practice in Macon, he took a special course at Harvard under the elder Agassiz, graduating as B. S. in 1851. Within a year he became professor of natural sciences in Oglethorpe College, Georgia; later he occupied the chair of geology and physics in South Carolina College, and during the civil war he served as chemist of the Confederate government. During these early years his fame grew and spread throughout his own country and others, and his abilities shone through the war-clouds beyond those of his contemporaries with scarce an exception; and in 1869 he was invited to the chair of geology in the University of California. This important position he filled, with a success bringing him world-wide renown, to the day

of his death.

The instinct of the explorer, as well as of the scientific geographer, was strong in Professor Le Conte. While still a youth (in 1844) he set out with a young kinsman to explore the then remote regions about the Great Lakes and the sources of the Mississippi; and for weeks the two were beyond settlements, out of reach of habitations save those of Indians, subsisting on fish and game, and mastering wood-craft and all manner of travel-sense-for, in addition to walking, they paddled a thousand miles in birchbark canoes. After his transfer to the Pacific coast, Professor Le Conte continued to seize every opportunity for outdoor work; he was more intimately acquainted with the Yosemite Valley than any scientific contemporary, and explored the neighboring and still more picturesque Hetch-hetchy more minutely than any other man; and his personal knowledge of the high sierras, the auriferous foot-hills, the coast ranges, and the great valley of California was unexcelled. His taste for and experience in the actual flavored all his numerous geologic writings; to him earth-science was geography seen deep and clear. These writings are unrivalled in simplic

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ity and comprehensiveness-his "Elements of Geology," indeed, is beyond comparison in any language as an introduction to the science of the earth.

Professor Le Conte was geographer and geologist, and much more besides ; his original researches in optics, in several lines of human physiology, and in various other subjects, raised him to the rank of authority; and he had the faculty withal of comprehending and assimilating the results of other men's work in such wise that he was at home in every field of science. In his prime when the doctrine of biotic evolution was first formulated, he contributed to its diffusion materially and with a special effectiveness by reason of his own original work, as well as his charm of personality and manifest sincerity of purpose; and one of his most noteworthy books is "Evolution in its Relation to Religious Thought" (1887). He was among the pioneers also in the acceptance and promulgation of the doctrine of conservation, one of the first to extend the principle to the domain of vitality, and the first to extend it into the realm of mentality; and he was one of the few thinkers of the last decade to consider

favorably that form of the doctrine of conservation in which the persistence is conceived to inhere in the particle rather than primarily in the cosmos as a whole. In fullest sense he was a savant; and every subject touched by his versatile. mind was enlivened and made clearer and more attractive by the touch. At the same time his heart reached out to every matter of human interest; he abounded in the milk of human kindness; his modesty and charity and never-failing courtesy impressed and captivated; in every respect he was one of the most lovable as well as the most admirable of men.

Professor Le Conte died as he lived, a student of nature. With a small party he returned to the Yosemite Valley early in July, for the purpose of reviewing recent suggestions as to the origin of the magnificent gorge; but the diminished. air-pressure of the mountains led to a cardiac derangement, which proved fatal within a few hours. He died on July 6, at the ripe age of 78, in a little camp shadowed by the towering granite walls of the cañon he had lived to make famous.

W JM.

The German South Polar Expedition will take a full equipment of aerial apparatus to make systematic kite ascensions from aboard ship during the voyage southward and also during the months in the Antarctic regions. The Monthly Weather Review states that the kites are of three sizes: the large Marvin, like those used by the Weather Bureau, of 63 square meters surface; Hargrave kites, of 4 and 234 square meters surface, and light Eddy kites, of 234 square meters, which are very advantageously used in lifting and sustaining the larger kites with instruments in light

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T. MCKINLEY, with an altitude of 20,464 feet, is the highest mountain in North America, and forms the central point of an enormous and surpassingly grand mountain mass, situated at the headwaters of the Sushitna and Kuskokwim Rivers, in Alaska. The range is a portion of the Cordilleran system of North America, which follows in a general way the contour of the west coast of the continent through Alaska and down the Alaskan peninsula.

The mountain group is extremely rugged and is covered with snow and ice to within 2,000 or 2,500 feet of sea-level. Down the sides of the mountains flow many glaciers; one which flows off to the northeast is between 20 to 30 miles in length and six and eight miles in breadth, and extends to the Chulitna River, a branch of the Shushitna forming the chief source of water supply of that stream. The Chulitna River at the base of the mountains has an altitude of only about 500 feet, showing a descent of 20,000 feet in the 30 miles between the summit of the mountain and the river.

Mt. McKinley was known to the Russians settled about the head of Cook Inlet nearly 100 years ago, and was called

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