proportion of the damage suffered by the forests as the lumbermen pretend that they do. Mr. Coleman, Commissioner of Agriculture, proposed the appointment of a committee to draft suitable forestry bills to be made laws by the General and State governments, and to labor with legislative committees to secure attention to them.
Among the other special topics considered in the papers were "Facts in regard to the Present State of American Forestry: State of Forest Legislation in the United States," N. H. Egleston; "What have the Different States done in regard to their Forests?" J. S. Hicks; "What are the Requisites of an Effective Forest-Fire Legislation?" S. W. Powell; "Lumbering Interests—their Dependence on Systematic Forestry," J. E. Hobbs; "Trees as Educators," Professor Edward North; "Profits of Forest-Culture," B. P. Poore; "Need of a National Forest Policy," Hon. Warner Miller; "Profits of Forest-Culture: State of Forest Legislation in the State of New York," Hon. H. R. Low.
The History of a Game.—Mr. J. W. Crombie read a paper before the British Association on what he styled "A Game with a History"—hop-scotch. As children in their play generally imitated something they had observed to be done by their elders, and a game once introduced was handed down from generation to generation, many innocent-looking children's games concealed strange records of ancient ages and pagan times. The game of hopscotch was one of considerable antiquity, having been known in England for more than two centuries, and it was played all over Europe under different names. Signor Pitre's solar explanation of its origin appeared improbable, for not only was the evidence in its favor extremely weak, but it would require the original number of divisions in the figure to have been twelve instead of seven, the number indicated by a considerable body of evidence. It would seem more probable that the game at one time represented the progress of the soul from earth to heaven through various intermediate states, the name given to the last court being most frequently paradise or an equivalent, such as crown or glory, while the names of the other courts corresponded with the eschatological ideas prevalent in the early days of Christianity. Some such game existed before Christianity, and the author considered it had been derived from several ancient games. Possibly the strange myths of the Labyrinths might have had something to do with hop-scotch, and a variety of the game played in England, under the name of "round hop-scotch," was almost identical with a game described by Pliny as being played by the boys of his day. The author believed that the early Christians adopted the general idea of the ancient game, but they not only converted it into an allegory of heaven, with Christian beliefs and Christian names, they Christianized the figure also. They abandoned the heathen labyrinth and replaced it by the form of the basilica, the early Christian church, dividing it into seven parts, as they believed heaven to be divided, and placing paradise, the inner sanctum of heaven, in the position of the altar, the inner sanctum of the early church.
The Indians of Mount Roraima.—Mr. E. F. Im Thurm read some notes, in the Anthropological Section of the British Association, on the red-men about Mount Roraima, in British Guiana. He had found them still in the stone age, but not in the extremely primitive condition he had anticipated. There was no other place in British Guiana where the stone age still subsisted. These Indians live in small conical huts clustered into villages, and including a church, where they imitated, without understanding, the religious services they had seen at some far-off mission. They were generally ugly, some even repulsive, but hospitable and kind, and the reception the speaker's party had met with could not be surpassed in courtesy in the most civilized community. They made stone implements of a remarkable kind, such as adzes and axes, but stones were more usually fashioned, by a process of rubbing, into imitations of fish and articles of ornament. Their games were very interesting, some of them being imitations of animals, and others a kind of rhythmic swinging to a slow chant. The isolation of tribes, and even that of families, was remarkable. It had
