ber is constantly increasing through its adoption by
the numerous races of India, where, even before the close of the last
century, it was about as important as Latin during the greatness of
Rome, and by the fact that the Spanish and Portuguese elements in
Mexico and Central and South America show a constant tendency to die
out, much as the population of Spain fell from 30,000,000 to 17,000,000
during the nineteenth century. As this goes on, in the Western
hemisphere, the places left vacant are gradually filled by the more
progressive Anglo-Saxons, so that it looks as if the study of ethnology
in the future would be very simple.

"The people with cultivation and leisure, whose number is increasing
relatively to the population at each generation, spend much more of
their year in the country than formerly, where they have large and
well-cultivated country seats, parts of which are also preserved for
game. This growing custom on the part of society, in addition to being
of great advantage to the out-of-town districts, has done much to save
the forests and preserve some forms of game that would otherwise, like
the buffalo, have become extinct.

"In astronomy we have also made tremendous strides. The old-fashioned
double-convex lens used in telescopes became so heavy as its size grew,
that it bent perceptibly from its own weight, when pointed at the
zenith, distorting the vision; while when it was used upon a star near
the horizon, though the glass on edge kept its shape, there was too
much atmosphere between it and the observed object for successful
study. Our recent telescopes have, therefore, concave plate-glass
mirrors, twenty metres in diameter, like those used for converging the
sun's rays in solar engines, but with curves more mathematically exact,
which collect an immense amount of light and focus it on a sensitive
plate or on the eye of the observer, whose back is turned to the object
he is studying. An electrical field also plays an important part, the
electricity being as great an aid to light as in the telephone it is to
sound. With these placed generally on high mountain peaks, beyond the
reach of clouds, we have enormously increased the number of visible
stars, though there are still probably boundless regions that we cannot
see. These telescopes have several hundred times the power of the
largest lenses of the nineteenth century, and apparently bring Mars and
Jupiter, when in opposition, within one tho