THREE MILES A MINUTE.

THE following account is sent us by the company interested, of what is claimed to be a great railway invention for the transportation of mails and light freight. The Weems railway system, incorporated under the name of the Electro-Automatic Transit Company of Baltimore, has patented its multiplicity of electrical and mechanical appliances in the United States and all over the world as a preliminary to putting the system regularly to work wherever required. By this electro-automatic arrangement the morning

in the surface of the ground over which the road passes. The mail and express cars are telescoped in forming a train, the former into the end of the motor-car, and the latter into that of the one preceding it, forming a flexible train of cars, offering an unbroken surface to the air. The rear end of the rear car is pointed in a similar manner to the front of the motor-car, thus preventing any suction as the train rushes on its way. The motor may pull one car or a train of cars.

All trains will be controlled from a generating station, where will be placed an electrical generating plant. Electrical brakes are

papers may be delivered for the breakfast-table, and the evening papers before supper-time, at distant points. It will deliver letters almost with the promptitude of the telegraph sending a message. The mails between New York and Omaha will be carried in a night. It will handle perishable light freight from long distances, will deliver with celerity the mails and parcels in cities and suburban towns, and will multiply many times the business of the postoffice and express companies. Its advantages are not alone in its speed, but in the economy and frequency with which trains can be despatched. In addition to all these things, it will save interest on remittances at long distances, will bring the people closer together,

to be used, and trains are started, stopped, speed lessened, and backed at will from the station. Special appliances will inform the operator in charge of the generating station of the exact location of the train from the time it leaves or passes any given point until it reaches its destination. It has not yet been determined how far apart the generating stations shall be placed. Possibly 100 miles may not be out of range, as the current can be run for 50 miles each way from the station as a centre without much loss of electricity.

The patents of the company number 143 in the United States and the principal countries of the world, covering the vital details

and will create new enterprises. Doubtless, as in the case of the telegraph, its important uses cannot be anticipated in advance of its going into active operation. Its development will create new fields of usefulness not now thought of. Such, in brief, are what the persons interested in this invention claim for it.

The motor-car is 18 feet long and 2 feet square at each end. It is pointed in front, the wedge or point being below the longitudinal centre, adjusting it to the air pressure, thus keeping the car down to the track. To reduce atmospheric friction to a minimum, all wheels and electrical appliances are placed within the walls of the cars. The road is to be built on the surface of the ground, with track of 24 inches gauge, and will cost about $5,000 per mile. In thickly settled districts the road can be elevated, the varied length of the uprights being a cheap mode of covering irregularities

of this novel system. The principles patented involve special form of rail, making it impossible for trains to jump the track at any rate of speed; form of electrical safety rail, carrying the outgoing current and returning the same on the same rail (this rail can be crossed by pedestrians or vehicles with perfect safety); form of conductors and rails combined, with insulation of the same for carrying currents over long distances; means of starting, stopping, backing, and controlling trains from the generating stations; method of regulating the electrical current automatically on trains while in motion, increasing the power in ascending and decreasing the same in descending grades; means whereby trains automatically register themselves at every station as they pass every mile of track; form of journals and boxes for fast speed to avoid heating; reducing the air pressure at high speed to a mini

mum by pointed cars splitting the air in front, and preventing suction in the rear, while in transit; reducing the cross-section of cars to a minimum, and enclosing the wheels and electrical equipment within the walls of the same to offer as little resistance to the air as possible; telescoping the cars of a train to present to the air an unbroken surface; special switch for rails; keeping the centre of gravity of the whole train below the axles. Patents have also been secured for a passenger system which applies to the conversion of existing steam railroads into electric railroads, which cover the only safe mode of rapid transit for passengers.

A series of experiments have been made at Laurel, Md., to show what the Weems railway system will do. This experimental line is a circuit of exactly two miles. Over this route there are 29 changes of grade, some of them very heavy, even to the extent of 108 feet to the mile. The generating plant there contains all the electrical appliances necessary to the attainment of high speed by a railroad-train. There is also special machinery for experimentation, and the perfecting of all mechanical and electrical inventions tending to advance and improve the system. All tests of speed have been made upon heavy grades and curves combined, too great ever to be required in the construction of a commercial line: therefore the experiments demonstrate the high rate of speed which will be obtained upon lines built for business puposes. At this experiment station 2 miles per minute are made around a heavy curve, or the equivalent of 180 miles an hour, or 3 miles a minute, on a level track. Prior to the inauguration of this system, 20 miles per hour was the fastest time ever made by any kind of electrical railroad travel.

At the experiment station there are no extensive works; and the motor-car, when it comes out from under its shed in obedience to the will of the engineer in the distant plant building where the electric dynamo generates the current, moves deliberately, slowly, and with absence of all sound. This cigar-shaped car, painted a bright red and moving sharp end foremost, at first sight does not seem a wonderful thing as it goes quietly along the track; but later, when the engineer at the dynamo puts on more power, or, as a steam-car man would say, more steam, and the creeping thing on the ground hastens its movement until it fairly flies, and becomes a moving speck of red, spectators feel the progress being made in applied science, and talk of the wonders of electricity, and the great things it will accomplish in the active affairs of life in the near future. All who have witnessed the successful trials at Laurel are impressed with the great stride made in the matter of rapid transit by electricity.

Arrangements are now being made for the building of an extended road between distant cities, and Baltimore will be one of the stopping-points on the line.

The officers of the Electro-Automatic Transit Company of Baltimore City are Dr. Julian J. Chisolm, president; O. J. Smith of New York, vice-president; Alex. Brown, treasurer; William M. Pegram, secretary; David G. Weems, general manager; J. J. Chisolm, Edward B. Bruce, B. F. Gambrill, O. J. Smith, Robertson Taylor, Franklin J. Morton, Alex. Brown, S. E. George, William M. Pegram, Edwin F. Abell, David G. Weems, directors.

Mr. David G. Weems of Baltimore is the inventor of the system. Mr. O. J. Smith, the vice-president, is president of the American Press Association of New York. The officers of the company have made frequent visits to witness the various trials, and with each successful increase of speed made have enlarged their expectations of future results.

WHO ARE THE AMERICAN INDIANS? 1 WHEN Columbus discovered America, he discovered not only a new continent, but a new people, - the American Indians. From one end to the other of its broad expanse the continent was occupied by Indian tribes that had held the land from time immemorial, - so far, at least, as their own traditions aver, knowing nothing of any country but their own. The commonly presented picture of the Indians as they appeared at the time of the discovery is that of a horde of wandering savages, half or wholly naked, living on roots and herbs, or existing by the capture of wild animals scarcely 1 Abstract of a lecture delivered in the National Museum, Washington, D.C., March 30, 1889, by H. W. Henshaw.

more savage than themselves, and the chief object of whose existence was to enslave, to torture, and to kill each other. Those who hold such opinions have ever taken a hopeless view of the Indian's present, and a still more hopeless view of his future. Such a picture conveys a totally false impression of the Indian, and of the state of culture to which he had attained at the era of the discovery. Though still living in savagery, he was in the upper confines of that estate, and was fast pressing upon the second stage of progress, that of barbarism; that is to say, he had progressed far beyond and above the lowest states in which man is known to live, to say nothing of the still lower conditions from which he must have emerged, and had travelled many steps along the long and difficult road to civilization.

Already he had become skilful in the practice of many arts. Though the skins of beasts furnished a large part of his clothing, he had possessed himself of the weaver's art; and from the hair of many animals, from the down of birds, and from the fibres of many plants, he knew how to spin, to weave, and to dye fabrics. Basketmaking he had carried to so high a degree of perfection that little further improvement was possible. The potter's art also was his; and, though his methods were crude and laborious, the results achieved, both as regards grace of form and ornamentation, may well excite admiration at the present day.

Copper had been discovered, and was mined and roughly beaten into shape to serve for ornament, and, to some slight extent, for mechanical use. In Mexico and Peru, gold, silver, and copper were worked; and many authors contend that the method of making bronze, an invention fraught with tremendous possibilities, had there been discovered.

In much of South and Central America, Mexico, and the eastern parts of the United States, so important an advance had been made in agriculture that it furnished a very large part of the food-supply, and it should not be forgotten that the chief product of the Indian's tillage, maize or Indian-corn, which to-day furnishes a large part of the world's food, was the gift of the Indian to civilization. A scarcely less important contribution to mankind is the potato, the cultivation of which also originated with the Indians. A third important agricultural product, though less beneficial, is tobacco, the use and cultivation of which had been discovered centuries before the advent of the European.

Architecture" may seem like a large word to apply to the dwellings of the Indians; nevertheless many of their houses were more substantial and comfortable than is generally supposed, while in the North-west many tribes reared dwellings of hewn planks, sometimes as large as 210 feet long by 30 feet wide, which were capable of accommodating several hundred individuals. More pretentious and durable were the communal houses of mud and stone reared by the pueblo people of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico; while farther south, in Central and South America, were edifices of hewn stone, which from their dimensions, the size of some of the blocks contained in them, and the extent and ornate character of the ornamentation, justly excite the wonder and admiration of the traveller and archæologist.

The advantages of a beast of burden had been perceived, and, though the human back furnished by far the greater part of the transportation, yet in North America the dog had been trained into an affective ally, and in the Andes the llama performed a similar office. Insignificant as was the use of the dog as a carrier, its employment cannot well be overestimated as a step in progress, when it is remembered that the plain's tribes that most employed it lived in the midst of the buffalo,- an animal which must have become of prime domestic importance in the never-to-be-enacted future of the Indian.

The need of some method of recording events and communicating ideas had been felt, and had given rise, even among the ruder tribes, to picture-writing, which in Mexico and Central America had been so far developed into ideographs, popularly called hieroglyphics, as to hint strongly at the next stage, the invention of a true phonetic alphabet. Nay, more: the Mexicans and Mayas are believed to have reached a state of true phonetic writing, where characters were made to represent not things, as true ideographic writing, but the names of things and even of abstract ideas; and this is a stage which may be said to be on the very

threshold of one of the proudest achievements of civilization, that of a phonetic alphabet.

Instead of living in an unorganized state, where each man was a law unto himself in all things, the Indians lived under organized forms of government, rude enough indeed when compared with the highly organized system of civilized nations, but marking an essential advance on the conditions attained by savage peoples in other parts of the world. The chieftaincy was transmitted by wellunderstood laws, or, as in some tribes, was more purely elective. Their social system was very ingenious and complex, and, being based largely upon kinship ties, was singularly well fitted for the state to which they had attained, of which indeed it was simply an expression and outgrowth. In many sections a considerable advance had been made in political confederation, and neighboring tribes combined for defence and to wage war against a common enemy. They had invented many and singularly efficient laws to repress and punish lawlessness against the individual and the social body, and as a consequence they enjoyed almost entire immunity from theft and many other crimes.

The development of religious ideas among our Indians is a curious and instructive study. Though the Great Spirit and the Happy Hunting Ground which missionaries and theologians thought they had discovered among them are now known to have had no existence, the Indians had by no means reached the state of culture in which they were found without developing religions. Their gods or fetiches were innumerable, their priests endowed with immense influence, and their ceremonies of devotion and propitiation were as devout as they were elaborate. The precision of the beliefs of many tribes and the elaborateness of their rituals are simply astonishing. Thus their advance in the domain of religious thought equalled, if it did not surpass, their progress in some other directions.

If by medicine we mean the rational treatment of disease, the Indian can be said to have learned only the rudiments of the healing art. Medicine, in so far as it was a distinct profession, was almost wholly in the hands of the medicine-man or shaman, who filled the twofold office of priest and doctor. Neither the theory nor the practice of the shaman had in it any thing that was rational and very little that was efficacious, except through the influence exercised over the mind of the patient; in other words, except so far as the shaman was a faith-curer. Whatever that is marvellous in the modern cases of faith-cure can be more than matched out of the practice and experience of the shaman, who learned his trade long before the European came to these shores. He who would see the Indian shaman need not seek the wilds of the Far West. He may find his counterpart on Pennsylvania Avenue. The whole medical practice of the Indian shaman was based upon the idea that all disease was the effect of evil disease-spirits that had obtained lodgement in the body, or that it was caused by witchcraft; and, so long as practice was directed to the dislodgement of these spirits, no rational treatment was possible. I am aware that the above idea of Indian medicine is contrary to popular belief, which, to some extent at least, is in harmony with the claims of alleged Indian doctors of white extraction, who claim to have derived their skill and their herbs directly from the hands of Indian experts. Recent and carefully conducted investigations on this subject, however, fully substantiate the above statements. Though roots and herbs were employed in the treatment of nearly all diseases, they were chiefly used as adjuncts to the charms and sorceries of the medicine-man. Often they were not given to the patient at all, but were taken by the medicine-man to heighten his power over the disease-spirits. Often they were applied by being rubbed on the body of the patient, or by being blown in the shape of smoke on the afflicted part.

Among the Indians was found flourishing to a remarkable degree the so-called doctrine of seals or signatures. A few examples of the doctrine derived from the eastern Cherokee by Mr. James Mooney may prove of interest. Doubtless you are all familiar with the cone-flower. Thhe Cherokee call it deer-eye, and from its fancied resemblance to the strong-sighted eye of the deer, and its connection by name (for the Indian believes that there is a potent connection between the name of a thing and the thing itself), it is used as a wash for ailing eyes.

The common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) is used as a vermifuge, because the red stalk looks like a worm.

An infusion of the roots of the hoary pea (Tephrosia virginiana), called devil's shoe-strings in the South because of their toughness, is used by the Cherokee ball-players as a wash to strengthen their bodies, and by the women as a hair-wash to strengthen it and keep it from falling.

Who of you has ever walked in our woods without getting on his clothing the common beggar's lice (Desmodium)? How tenaciously they stick, you all know: so do the Cherokee; and because the burrs stick fast, they use a tea made of them to strengthen the memory. The Cherokee at least can dispense with the service of a Loisette.

You whose ambition it is to be good singers have only to drink a tea of crickets, according to the Cherokee, for does not the cricket possess a fine voice, and doth he not sing merrily ?

ences man

The tendency of the human mind to speculate and to draw infera tendency common alike to the savage and the civilized cannot be held in check forever, however strong the bonds; and just as knowledge and science escaped from priestly thrall within the history of civilized times, so a certain small amount of knowledge of the therapeutical use of drugs was gaining ground among the common folk of the Indians. It was fairly to be called old woman's practice, as it was largely in their hands. It grew out of observation. Infusions of certain herbs produced certain results, acted as emetics or purgatives, and hence these herbs came to be employed with something like an intelligent purpose. Many of the herbs used were absolutely inert; many were harmful, of course, since where there is practically no true diagnosis and no correct knowledge of the effect of drugs there can be no really intelligent selection of remedies; but in the case of certain simple diseases, herbs, the actual cautery, and, above all, the sweating process, were beginning to be recognized by the common folk as serviceable, and to be employed to some extent without recourse to the shaman. As the child must creep ere it can walk, in such theories and treatment, childish though they may seem, may be discerned the beginnings of the noble science of medicine, which, having largely cast aside the superstitions that hampered its infant steps, now walks erect; and, although of late she seems to have revived the beliefs of her childhood, her handmaiden, science, bids her call the demon disease-spirits ignorance and vicious habits; the diseases themselves, bacilli or germs. The Indian believed that the white man carried the spirit of small-pox in bottles, and let it loose among them. Modern science actually does bottle the small-pox germs, and germinate them at will. So the Indian theory of disease reappears in a new form.

Such in briefest outline are some of the achievements of the Indian as he was found by civilized man. Whatever value may be placed upon them, whatever rank may be assigned them in the scale of human efforts, they were at least his own; and some of them compare favorably with the record of our Aryan ancestors before they split up into the numerous nations which have done so much to civilize the world. Many, I am aware, hold that the Indian had progressed as far towards civilization as his capacities admitted. Others have held, and possibly some now hold, that he was already on the decline: they see in his crude ideas and rude inventions only the degradation of a higher estate; in other words, instead of a savage preparing to enter civilization through the necessary halfway state of barbarism, he is held a half-civilized man lapsing into savagery. Such views, it is needless to say, find no favor in the mind of the evolutionist. To him the achievements of the Indian are only the mile-stones which have marked the progress of every civilized nation, in its march from what it was to what it is; to him the chief value and significance of his studies of the mental state of the Indian, as expressed in his mythology, his medicine, his social and political organization, or in his more concrete arts, is the fact that in them he reads the records of his own past. If there be any truth whatever in the theory of evolution as applied to human progress, only one inference can be drawn from the history of the Indian race as it appears in historical pages, and in the no less eloquent records interpreted by archæologists. This inference is, that, starting in its career later than some other races, or being less favored by circumstances or conditions of environment, or,pos