overed with hair. This
anomaly was present in several of the maternal ancestors of the woman.

MEN WHO LIVE IN TREES.--Dr. Louis Wolf, who made the sensational
discovery a while ago that the Sankuru River afforded a more direct
and more easily navigated route to Central Africa than the Congo, made
another discovery in the course of the same journey which was quite as
remarkable if not so important. On the banks of the Lomami River, far
toward the centre of the continent, he says he found whole villages
that were built in the trees. The natives, partly to protect
themselves from the river when in flood, and partly to make it more
difficult for their enemies to surprise them, build their huts on the
limbs of the trees where the thick foliage almost completely hides the
structures from view. The inmates possess almost the agility of
monkeys, and they climb up or descend from their little houses with
astonishing ease. It is believed they are the only Africans yet known
who live in trees.

In Borneo some of the natives are said to live in trees, and Mr.
Chalmers, in his book on New Guinea, tells of a number of tree houses
that he visited on that island. These huts, which are built near the
tops of very high trees, are used for look-out purposes, or as a place
of refuge for women and children in case of attack. They are perfect
little huts with sloping roofs and platforms in front, to which
extends the long ladder, by means of which the natives reach the huts.
Mr. Gill describes one of these houses which was used as a residence.
He says it was well built, but that it rocked uncomfortably in the
wind.

PROTYLE. The address of Professor William Crookes before the British
Association, upon the "Genesis of the Elements," is one of the most
important contributions to chemical philosophy that has been published
for a long time. Reasoning from the recently discovered law of
periodicity among the elements, he discusses the possibility of their
being formed from the cooling of one primitive form of matter, which
he calls _protyle_. While he admits that we have no direct evidence
that the elements are different manifestations of the same form of
matter, yet he thinks that the observed phenomena of chemistry and
physics point very strongly to such a conclusion, and agrees with
Faraday, that, "to decompose the metals, then to reform them, to
change them from one to another, and to realize the once absurd notion
of transmutation,