Most

Canada has cut the confederacy in two. of the Piegans, with the few surviving Atsinas, reside on the American side, where a large reservation has been set apart for them, along the head waters of the Missouri River. The residue of the Piegans, with the Siksika, Kena, and Sarcee bands, dwell on reserves laid off for them near the southern boundary of the Canadian northwest territories, adjacent to the Rocky Mountains. Thus the lands occupied by these tribes, though much diminished in extent, are in the same region which they held fifty years ago, when their confederacy was the dominant power among all the Indians west of the Mississippi. At that period their numbers were reckoned at thirty thousand souls. Various causes, but more especially the ravages of the small-pox, have greatly reduced them. The population of the four Canadian reserves is computed at about 6,500, divided as follows: Blackfeet (Siksika), 2,400; Bloods (Kena), 2,800; Piegans (Piekané, 800; Sarcees, 500. On the American reservation there are stated to be about 2,300, mostly Piegans, with some Sarcees. This would bring up the total number of Indians in these tribes to nearly 9,000 souls.

The country inhabited by the Blackfeet was the favorite resort of the buffalo. The vast herds which roamed the plains, or found shelter during the winter in the woody recesses of the mountains, furnished the tribes not merely with food, but with the skins which made their tents and their clothing. The complete extermination of these animals, which has taken place during the last five years, has made an entire change in the mode of life of these Indians. From a race of wandering hunters, they have become a community of farmers, and, as the official reports show, have displayed a remarkable aptitude for the arts of civilized life. Under the direction of superintendents and farm instructors appointed by the Canadian government, they have erected comfortable log-houses, well furnished with cooking-stoves, table-ware, and other household appliances, and have raised large quantities of potatoes, barley, oats, turnips, and other esculents. They have shown themselves always orderly and prudent in their dealings with the government and the white settlers.

The Blackfoot language was formerly supposed to be entirely different from any of the languages spoken by the surrounding tribes. This was the report of the first explorers. Further investigations have shown that this opinion was not well founded. The language proves to be Algonkin in its grammar, but to be in a large part of its vocabulary widely different from other Algonkin tongues. It is evidently a mixed language, of the

or nation by another speaking a different tongue. What is known of the history of the Blackfeet shows how this conquest and intermixture may have taken place. The Blackfoot tribes formerly inhabited the Red River country, from which, as there is good reason to believe, they were driven westward by the Crees, who formerly dwelt in Labrador and about Hudson Bay, but who now occupy the ancient homes of the Blackfeet along the Red River and the Saskatchewan. The Blackfeet, when they retreated to their final refuge in the valleys and plains along the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, had in their turn to overcome and absorb the population which they found there. The traditions of the people, and other circumstances, seem to show that the tribe thus conquered and whose language probably furnished the foreign portion of the Blackfoot vocabulary had come from the west or Oregon side of the mountains.

In further confirmation of this view, it is shown that the Blackfeet have not only a mixed language, but also a mixed religion. While their legendary cosmogony and their principal deities are purely Algonkin, their chief religious ceremony, the famous sun-dance, to which they are fanatically devoted, the most extraordinary trial of faith and of endurance known among the western Indians, - is clearly of exotic origin. It is wholly unknown to the other Algonkin tribes, except to a few Crees, who have apparently learned it from the Blackfeet. It also prevails among the Dakotas, but chiefly in the western bands nearest to the mountains and to the Blackfeet.

The form of government among the Blackfoot tribes, as among the Algonkin tribes in general, is very simple. Each tribe has a head chief, and each of the bands composing a tribe has its subordinate chief; but the authority of these chiefs is little more than nominal. Their prerogatives are chiefly those of directing the movements of a camp, of presiding in council, and of representing the tribe or band in conferences with other communities. The term confederacy,' applied to the union of the Blackfoot tribes, is somewhat misleading. They have no proper inter-tribal league, like that of the Iroquois nations. There is simply a good understanding among them, arising partly from the bond of kinship, and partly from a sense of mutual dependence. Even the three proper Blackfoot tribes can hardly be said to have a general name for their whole community, though they sometimes speak of themselves as Sawketakix, or 'men of the plains,' and occasionally as Netsepoyè, or 'people who speak one language.'

The foregoing, as has been stated, is only a brief summary of the contents of this report, which is given in an abridged form in Nature, and will doubtless hereafter be published in full by the association. The facts which it presents disclose in the people of this aboriginal Switzerland qualities much above the average, and should lead to further inquiry into their history and characteristics.

SOME REACTION-TIME STUDIES.

THE study of reaction times derives a great interest and importance from the fact that by this means another bond of relation between mind and matter becomes apparent. All material actions require time. Mental actions as well, from the perception of a sensation to the highest expression of the intellect that offers itself to experimental investigation, also occupy an appreciable amount of time. This mental time is not constant as the time of a falling body in space, but is affected by slight variations in bodily and mental conditions.

A signal

M. Beaunis has studied the effect of one important mental requisite, namely, expectation. The reactions were made to a visual sensation, and 36 persons besides himself (most of whom were medical students) were experimented upon. (advertisement) was given, whereupon the subject held himself in readiness for the flash of light, so as to react by pressing the key as quickly as possible. The time between the signal and the flash of light is the expectation time; that between the light and the seeing of it, the reaction time. The expectation time was varied from .3 sec. to 3 sec., and the following conclusions were reached :

(1) As others had already shown, the reaction time is shorter if a signal is given than if it is not.

(2) The longer the expectation time, the shorter the reaction time. The experiment may be compared to the problem of finding an object in a dark room by bringing the light of a bull's-eye lantern upon it. When there is no signal, that is, when directed to find the object without time to get the lantern ready, it would evidently take longer to find the object than it would if time were given to get the lantern in position; and the longer this time, the quicker would the object be found. The attention acts as the bull's-eye lantern.

(3) The difference between the minimum and maximum times is greater than when a signal is not given, and increases as the expectation time increases.

(4) The influence of several individual differences, etc., was evident. In two of the medical

1 Revue philosophique, September, 1885.

students the reactions were always slow. In many it was very quick. M. Beaunis was the only person who was accustomed to this kind of experimentation, and in his case a much smaller percentage of experiments had to be thrown out as faulty than in the others. The effect of health was marked in one case. Feeling slightly indisposed in the morning, M. Beaunis's reaction time was .37 sec., i.e., abnormally slow. In the afternoon it was .222 sec., showing that the normal condition was returning. Two hours later it was normal (.160 sec.).

An extremely interesting research is that of Guiccordi and Ranzi,' in which they compare the reaction time to a sound impression in normal persons with the same in patients suffering from auditory hallucinations. The reaction time is obtained somewhat in this way. The making of the sound which serves as the stimulus sets into motion a chronoscope, which the subject stops, as soon as the sound is heard, by pressing an electric key. In this way the following table, giving in seconds the time necessary for hearing the sound, was prepared :

Taking the mean of the 10 shortest reactions, or comparing the minimum reaction time, we see that those suffering from hallucination are quicker in their perception of sound; and this difference must be ascribed to morbid irritability of these centres of apperception. On the other hand, the other averages, and especially the average divergence from the mean reaction time, i.e., the average variation, and the maximum time, show that normal persons can command a steadiness and regularity of the attention, which is impossible in those afflicted with sound hallucinations.

2

In many cases the reaction time is and must be studied under rather artificial conditions. This circumstance is apt to weaken inferences drawn from such studies to similar processes in normal mental activity. In a recent study of the time necessary for recognizing letters, numbers, colors, etc., this difficulty has been successfully overcome. Small letters were fastened to a revolving drum, and looked at through a slit of variable width in a screen held before the letters. The letters are

1 Revue philosophique, September, 1885.

2Ueber die zeit der erkennung und benennung von schriftzeichen, bildern und farben," by J. M. Cottell. Philosophiche studien (Wundt), vol. ii., No. 4. Leipzig, 1985. The work was done in the psychophysical laboratory of Johns Hopkins university.

adjusted at such distances that, with a slit 1 cm. wide, one letter is always in sight; if 2 cm. wide, two letters; and so on. By varying the rate of rotation of the drum and the width of the slit, the time necessary for the reading of a single letter under various circumstances was obtained. Up to a certain limit, this time is shortened as the slit is widened. This fact is to be interpreted as follows: In reading these letters, two time elements are involved: 1°, that of recognizing the letter; and, 2°, that of naming it. The association between the sight of the letter and its name is so close, that the latter action is performed automatically: hence, if the letters follow one another with so great a rapidity that the first can be named while the second is being recognized, the average time for reading a single letter will evidently be shortened; and the experiments show that this power of carrying over one letter while pronouncing the preceding can be active when three, or in the case of several persons when four or five, letters were present to the eye at once.

Another series of experiments showed that it takes longer to count letters than to name them; and if the letters are counted in groups of two, or better still of three, instead of singly, the counting time is reduced.

The time necessary for reading words in different languages was also studied; and the general result is, that the maximum rapidity with which words forming sentences can be read varies directly with one's acquaintance with the language. A German read 100 German words in 18.4 sec., but 100 English words in 29.1 sec. This method offers a means of objectively testing a person's acquaintance with a foreign language. If the words are read backwards (thus eliminating the sense of the passage, and reducing the process to mere reading), the time is lengthened; but the smaller one's acquaintance with the language, the less difference in time between reading it forwards and backwards.

It seems that among those tested, women read faster than men ; and Germans take longer to spell their words than English-speaking persons.

If small strips of colors are used, instead of letters, it takes almost twice as long to name the true color as it would to name a letter; and this difference in time is due to the greater difficulty in finding the proper name. In this case the association between the color and its name is a loose one. These studies will be continued in the next number of the Studien. J. J.

NEXT year's exhibition at South Kensington, of the products of India and the colonies, is to be the last of the sort in that locality. Liverpool is to have an exhibition of shipping and means of transport.

THE LAWS OF TEMPERATURE IN THE AUSTRIAN ALPS.

DR. JULIUS HANN of Vienna, editor of the Austrian meteorological journal and a leader among European meteorologists, has lately completed his detailed studies on 'Die temperaturverhältnisse der oesterreichischen alpenländer,' which are now published in three parts in the Sitzungsberichte of the Vienna academy of sciences. All available observations are included in the reductions, and the results are stated with great detail. As to method, attention should be emphatically called to the reduction to normal means; that is, to the mean of some definite series of years, in this case the thirty years from 1851 to 1880: thus, if a station had records from 1855 to 1884, the mean of these thirty years' observations was reduced to what it most probably would be for 1851-1880 by the use of a correction determined from neighboring stations where the records covered both periods; that is, from 1850 to 1884. Wild of Russia, and Buchan of Scotland, have employed this method for low-level stations; Hann is the first to show its applicability to mountain stations also. As to results, one of the most striking is the appearance of the increase of temperature upwards in the thirty years' winter mean of valley and mountain stations as a persistent climatic element. Observations of late years have shown that this inversion of temperature — extreme cold in valleys with moderate cold on mountains was common enough in the winter during anticyclonic or high-pressure weather, but it is here first shown to be a persistent inversion characteristic of the winter mean. Hann was also the first to explain, several years ago, the peculiarities of the warm winter alpine wind known as the föhn, which depends directly on the unduly high temperature of the upper air in winter.

BEN NEVIS METEOROLOGICAL

OBSERVATORY.

THE highest of the Scotch mountains, Ben Nevis, reaches an altitude of four thousand four hundred feet; less than five miles away, the sea stretches a long arm up the submerged portion of the great glen to Fort William. On this wellchosen summit, in the path of many a storm from the Atlantic, the Scottish meteorological society has built an observatory, here figured, for the direct study of the conditions of the upper air, which observations at their low-lying stations must leave to inference. Most of the few mountain observatories of Europe stand at a greater height than the summit of the Ben, but none of

in the second part, and in the third many subordinate subjects. Our space will not allow us to do justice to the erudition of this great work, but we can, perhaps, exhibit its scope so that those who are interested in the circumstances which gave birth to the progenitors of our modern institutions may understand how rich a storehouse of learning has been provided for them.

The writer begins with the study of the now venerable words, stulium generale and universitas. Both terms were in vogue as early as 1300. The former phrase has not been found in use as the name of a high school prior to 1233-34, when it is applied to the school of Vercelli: the phrase studium universale is a little older. Universitas (as other writers, following Du Cange or the lexicographers, have pointed out) had originally no special reference to a seat of learning. It signified very nearly what we call a corporation, and was almost synonymous with such words as societas, collegium, corpus, communio, consortium. Gradually it came to be employed for the corporation devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, and then was restricted to this use, so that universitas oxoniensis was interchangeable with studium oxoniense; but the proper designation of a mediaeval high school was studium generale, or studium alone. As early as 1254, the word 'university' is used in Paris as equivalent to 'college.' The definition of Hugolinus is worth quoting: Universitas est plurium corporum collectio inter se distantium uno nomine specialiter eis deputato.'

From this preliminary inquiry, the writer proceeds to the history of the universities of Paris and Bologna, which, in his view, require more elaborate treatment than the other high schools, not only because of their extraordinary direct influence, but because their constitution is the key to that of many later foundations. The school at Salerno, older than the two just named, was quite subordinate in general influence. Savigny's theory that universities, by a sort of natural evolution, were developed around the chair of an illustrious teacher, is vigorously opposed by Denifle, who recognizes many factors as co-working in the origin of an enduring university. New methods of instruction, and privileges accorded by authority, seem to our author most potent influences; but even more important was the forming of corporations for the promotion of study, or, in other words, the introduction of combined or cooperative methods of instruction. The different modes in which such combinations were secured in Paris and Bologna are discussed at much length. After considering the origin of these typical foundations, in whose usages of five or six centuries ago may be found the germ of customs

and laws still recognized, even in the disjointed members of American universities, the author takes up, one by one, all the other European universities of the period he is considering. He makes four groups,-schools, improperly called universities; high schools without letters of authorization; high schools which were established by papal briefs; and high schools which received their privileges from papal and princely authority. Finally, the relation of universities to pre-existent schools is very fully discussed.

We have said enough to show that the writer is original, and to a considerable degree controversial. Whatever criticism his views may call forth, and they are likely to be most closely scrutinized in Germany,- his diligence in the collection of facts, his comprehensive views, and his abundant references to original authorities, entitle him to the highest praise. There is good reason to think that he is right in claiming that the period he is discussing, instead of belonging to the age of darkness, is one of those epochs when the mind of man has received new impulses of unusual and persistent force.

THE WASHBURN OBSERVATORY.

THE third volume of the Publications of the Washburn observatory,' lately issued, gives the results of the work of 1884. About 1,800 observations were made with the Repsold meridian-circle upon the gesellschaft southern fundamental stars and the Leyden Cape of Good Hope refractionstars. The instrumental constants are given for each observing day, and an investigation of the zenith-distance micrometer-screw and of the horizontal flexure of the instrument. In the cold winter weather of Wisconsin the micrometersprings turned out too weak to pull the slides, and had to be replaced with stiffer ones. The probable error of a single declination is now reduced to 0.4, a great improvement over that noted in vol. ii.; and a correction of +0′′.30 ± 0.026 to the constant of the Pulkowa refractions' seems to be called for by the observations of 1884 to suit the atmosphere over Madison. Professor Holden expresses his continued satisfaction with the Repsold meridian-circle, and appears to be making a very thorough study of it; and in this his example might well be followed with profit by some of our older established observatories. Two determinations of the latitude by Mr. G. C. Comstock are given, one from Professor Holden's and his own observations with the zenith-telescope, the other from his own with the prime-vertical transit, using both reflected and direct observations; the declina