IN 1924 Ralph Linton was sent by the Field Museum as leader of an ethnological expedition to determine whether the Malagasy — the native tribes of Madagascar — were of Asiatic origin. The striking resemblance of peoples of the Pacific to those of Madagascar, despite the wide separation of these regions, has constituted a problem in racial science. During his stay on the island Dr. Linton discovered evidence of an Asiatic migration which he believes took place at least two thousand years ago, the movement originating in the region of Java and Sumatra. His paper is printed through the courtesy of the Field Museum of Natural History. Francis Bowes Sayre is professor of law at Harvard University. It will be remembered that as Advisor to the late King of Siam he conducted an extraordinary and successful fight for that nation’s sovereignty, the account of which appeared in the Atlantic for November 1927. ¶Up to the time of his death, Colonel Charles a Court Repington was the foremost military critic in Europe. To his contributions to the London Times and Telegraph he brought a singular knowledge of military science and men, and during the war this, together with his close liaison with Continental statesmen and soldiers, made him a potent if unofficial agent for the Allies’ success. The present excerpts from his diary mark the occasion of a ’goodwill’ visit to the Continent in 1924. ¶The wife of a history professor, Lucy Wilcox Adams has more than a personal interest in the past. ‘ My literary experience,’ she writes us, ‘ consists chiefly in four years spent in London working for Mr. Francis W. Hirst on his Jefferson and on his life of Morley, as well as on his various economic and political writings.’

A few papers yet remain of that store which during his lifetime endeared the Reverend Samuel McChord Crothers to more than a generation of Atlantic readers. ¶This being a month of many church conventions, there is special timeliness in the analysis of church life made by the Right Reverend Charles Fiske of the Episcopal Diocese of Central New York. Dorothy Leonard tells us that she is ‘ what used to be called a “home body,” and has no record except three children.’ But we also know that her home has always been the ‘ Oneida Community.’ ¶For forty years a prominent member of the English department at Wellesley, Vida D. Scudder, now professor emeritus, is inviting her soul in Italy. ¶Winter and summer Henry Beston is at home in a secluded cabin on Cape Cod. ¶’The golfer’s suffering is long drawn out,’ writes Bernard Darwin, critic of the London Times; ’it may endure from the first tee shot to the last putt and there is no swift movement to make him forget it . . . there is probably no game in which temperament plays so important a part.’ Amen!

Dr. William H. Woglom is the secretary of the Association for Cancer Research and assistant director of the Crocker Institute for Cancer Research of Columbia University. Valeska Bari writes ‘purposeful things’ for the State of California and the Government of the United States; for us she writes stories drawn from her experiences in Porto Rico. Here is her guaranty of the present narrative: —

The village which I have called Acouji is Loiza, and the little green god was shown to me by a missionary who stayed in the district some time and who was most tantalizingly close-mouthed about the African drumming and dancing which she saw there. Gloria in the story is known to me personally, as is her family. The dodger advertising a long list of voodoo charms I sent up to Washington along with many other bits of local color. The soldier was sent to Porto Rico by the Veterans’ Bureau and his allotment was sent to him through the Red Cross.

Rosalie Hickler helps to persuade one that babies and poetry are not so incompatible as most people seem to think. ¶In the May AtlanticA. Edward Newton told of the adventures which he and Mrs. Newton shared in Scandinavia. In Paris his adventures are even more enviable. Lord Dunsany submitted his manuscript on the occasion of a recent visit to Boston.

Dr. Robert Stewart is Dean of the College of Agriculture of the University of Nevada. ¶The Honorable William M. Jardine is Secretary of Agriculture of the United States. ¶3A manufacturer of drop forgings, James Harvey Williams is president of the company bearing his name. In the March Atlantic Mr. Williams made a critical analysis of the Sherman antitrust laws, and in so doing voiced the dissatisfaction prevalent in many industries. In a postscript to his argument he suggests a concrete solution of the problem. Of an opposite economic persuasion, Murray T. Quigg is a member of the League for Industrial Rights and the editor of Law and Labor.

This sensitive and interesting letter has been forwarded to us by Dr. Carl Seashore, whose article on Musical Mind’ appeared in the March Atlantic.

MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA
DEAR DR. SEASHORE:-
I have just finished reading your article. I have been deaf since about eight years of age, totally so, but have never lost my love for music and can enjoy a concert better than many who can hear, and it is the only thing that thrills me so I fairly have goose flesh or the thrills run up and down my spine though I cannot hear a sound, and the pitch of my feeling largely depends on the piece played or the player.
The last time I heard music was some forty years ago and I do not remember a piano tone, but can often tell, possibly by instinct, if a piece is suitable for piano or organ. In my younger days I had friends who talked music to me as though I could hear and often took me with them when selecting music at the stores.
Time has dulled my feeling by touch, but I still enjoy touching a piano when one is playing; but alas, so few 1 know play the piano these days and I am unable to feel the vibrations of the radio to any extent. Years ago I tried to get the Edison Laboratories to experiment with something that would enable a deaf person to hear music by sense of touch, but they wrote back it was impracticable in connection with the phonograph.
I am always hearing music, if you can call it that. It is in the wind, the water, the rhythm of a train or steamer. To me the leaves still rustle, the limbs sough, the rivulet seems to make a tinkling sound. Josef Hofmann calls it Mental Music, which I suppose is the same as your Mental Imagery.
I have had music teachers laugh when I said I could enjoy music even though I could not hear it. I have my own, and was it not Keats who said, ‘Music that is heard is sweet, but music unheard is sweeter’?
When I get the music hunger I have my own concerts, and sometimes I play an imaginary violin or a piano or sing or lead an orchestra.
I often think I would like to plan a concert and show some people what a deaf person imagines music is — the only drawback being that the people who sang might not sing the way I would sing. Some are too mechanical. They look as expressive as a music box.
I used to be a typist and was often annoyed because there is no rhythm on a typewriter. I would write pages and not know what I copied, for one cannot dream and be practical too.
Many times I have tried to find a person who would tell me when a deaf person felt a jar and when a sound. It may not be connected with music, but I imagine some people hear music as I feel a jar. There is a vibration, but no sound.
My mother was always singing or whistling when I was a small girl. My grandmother sang old hymns in a quavering voice which I can still hear. Music must be born in us, as I have had friends who were deaf yet had heard music wonder how I got any pleasure out of it.
This is a very poor way of expressing myself, but possibly there are some who can understand how a person who is totally deaf can have a natural love for music — by which I mean Mental Music and music conveyed by the eye and not the ear, since I can sit so far from the musician or singer I get no vibrations except mental ones.
I would be glad to act as a subject for research were I only nearer New York or wherever a musical laboratory might be.
LEONORA HOAR

The modern American premise.

NEW YORK CITY
To THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC:
SIR :
Mr. James Truslow Adams has so lucidly set forth the faults and follies of our ancestors that he must be heard with respect when lie intimates in your April number that we are faultier and more foolish still. But there is perhaps more excuse than he would admit for the present confusion in political thinking, the grafting of Jeffersonian principle on Hamiltonian practice.
From past history Jefferson deduced that the poor were trustworthy; Hamilton, that the rich were on the whole less untrustworthy. Surely it is not too much to say that to the notion of our time both these doctrines have been completely exploded. If any lesson can be learned from history, post-Jeffersonian and pre-Jeffersonian as well, it is that no class, rich or poor, small or numerous, will prefer the general interest to its own. So we find ourselves enjoying a condition without a theory; we are living a conclusion (Hamiltonian, as it happens) which is justified by no major premise at all.
What then are we to do? Well, the English have managed to get along tolerably well without a major premise, but they are a utilitarian race, devoid of our lofty idealism! Your true American can no more live without a major premise than without a car of this year’s model; and those who seek a starting point for political thinking may find guidance in other departments of thought. The major premise of contemporary American theology and economies is that whatever is comfortable, and agreeable to the contemplation, must be true. God is, because we need Him; prosperity will endure forever because we should not know what to do if it did not. Our political thinkers thus follow respectable precedent in taking over the Jeffersonian major premise; for surely it is more agreeable to believe that all men can be trusted than to reserve confidence for a few.
It is true, as Mr. Adams says, that our principle is Jeffersonian, our practice Hamiltonian; and that this antinomy may make trouble for America in the future. But surely the cardinal dogmas of Americanism are that principle need not square with practice, and that we can leave the future to Divine Providence.
I am, Sir,
ELMER DAVIS

Regarding a letter from Mrs, Leonard Wood which appeared in this column, stating that 907 out of every 1000 Hindu girls marry between the ages of five and ten, a correspondent refers us to the official census report of 1921, Volume I, Part I, page 159, in which it is stated that 907 Hindu girls out of every 1000 pass the age of ten unmarried, and 600 out of every 1000 do not marry before 15.

The census would seem the best available authority.

We are sorry to have done unthinking injustice to the largest Protestant body in America; which, aside from its traditional opposition to Calvinism, touches but lightly upon contentious theological questions. The Atlantic’s incidental remark was based upon the attitude of certain MidWestern Methodist congregations which seemed to the editor quite at odds with the prevailing spirit of liberalism in the Methodist Communion.

WORTHINGTON, OHIO EDITOR ATLANTIC MONTHLY DEAR SIR:- In your March issue there is a statement which implies that you believe Methodists to he opposed to the scientific hypothesis of evolution. I am at a loss to account for such an impression. I have been a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church for thirty-three years. In that time there has not been a single official pronouncement against evolution, and during all of this time in the conference courses of study arid in the curricula of our theological seminaries the theory has been accepted and the interpretation of our Christian doctrines has been based thereon.
It may be that you had in mind the Dayton, Tennessee, three-ring circus. In all likelihood, most of the laity and many of the ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church South stand against the teaching of evolution. South of the Mason-Dixon line thought seems to advance very slowly.
In both the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Episcopal Church South the Fundamentalists have not been able to muster a sufficient following to make any impression whatever on the two General Conferences. I was a member of our General Conference which met in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1924. Of the eight hundred and fifty delegates, lay and clerical, from all parts of the world, I am certainly safe in saying that not more than one hundred and fifty could have been induced to vote for any proposition which would restrict freedom of speech on any point. The Methodist Episcopal Church is almost the only evangelical denomination which has not recently been torn and rent by the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy. These questions were settled long ago by us in official declaration. The General Conference of 1872 declared against the verbal inspiration of Holy Scripture. The General Conference of 1884, twenty-five years after Darwin’s Origin ofSpecies, officially accepted the evolutionary hypothesis.
I do not recall ever having seen an error in the editorial parts of the Atlantic Monthly before. I therefore am greatly comforted in finding that even in Boston human weakness may occasionally be manifested.
Very sincerely yours,
E. R. STAFFORD
Minister, Worthington Methodist Episcopal Church

The advantages of American citizenship have seldom been more genuinely expressed than in the copy of this letter forwarded by a friendly reader. ' It was transcribed,’ he explains, ‘ directly from one written in a cramped hand by an uneducated Lithuanian who, after many wanderings, came to the United States and is now employed as a mechanic in one of our shops. It has been my privilege to be of some assistance to this man, who is bringing up a large family, with an abiding respect for the United States and what its institutions have made possible for them. His letter is in acknowledgment of one of advice which I sent him.’

EAST MOLINE, ILLINOIS
HIGHLY ESTEEMED DEAR MR.-:
Accept my sincere thanks for your kindly, generous answer, advice, suggestions of 8th inst.
Need not to say, I am complying with your wise advise, am writing to my niece all about it in fact, I am enclosing to her your wonderful letter, with instruction to study blessed English or ask somebody that speaks that great, grand language to explain to her.
I am sorry I am bothering you, dear Mr.―, great, good man, with such unsurmountable problems. Your wisdomful answer is of inestimable. It says, almost: ‘Impossible to do it.’ And yet in my life happened what seemed absolutely impossible, Too many to write here, it would take a volume. I was denied schools or anything that flay children take for granted here, such like printed matter. One can pick here all he wants to for nothing. And yet, in addition, I had many setbacks, such like aiding others, compulsory army, five years services, etc., and succeeded in that I liked to study, to act, to investigate, and, most of all, to be honest, truthful, industrious.
It is true what prophet in Old Testament wrote and in New was confirmed: ‘The rock that masons threw away as good for nothing and yet became corner stone of the temple,’ And another truth: ’Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.’ I am not Bible bug. My popular writer probably is most unpopular — Dante with his ’Inferno.’ I shall confess, last summer, after forty-seven years, or since 1881, absence from that unfortunate Lithuania, for curiosity’s sake, I made a trip there. Now, who likes to have a picnic in a cemetery, or rest with the dentist, or wealth in jail, or conversation advice from insane maniac, only that would read my ‘Inferno’ about Lithuania. So, dear Mr.―, to spare torment, I will refrain to write what is there.
Seeing those foreigners here disobeying laws, degrading themselves by gambling, drinking, bad company, etc., I believe not only what Abraham said to the Lazar’s brother, but also if Abraham had lifted him to heaven he would in few days or weeks forgotten all about his experience and made his worst to make the heaven into hell.
True we have here some unemployment, even some poverty, hard labor, cheap wages, etc. But nothing could be in slighter degree compared to what I saw there. I often go to the shores of the Mississippi River, and on that shores piles upon piles of driftwood, excellent fuel for cooking food or warming shanty, take all you want to free. Even railroads with proper arrangement would give away old rotten ties. Even in big cities factories and wrecking companies are giving away free wood. Land companies and others are giving empty lots to those who desire to spade and have a real good garden of vegetables. Even unemployment: Any man, woman, girl or boy who would work hard ten hours a day for only lodging and meals, and perhaps few cents, always would have that job. Nothing like that in Lithuania. Why? It is not so overpopulated like China or India. True, there are no mines or factories, but I saw other lands with no mines, or factories, and yet people not so poor, nor impoverished to great extent. I was also in Belgium and Czecho-Slovakia, and yet there not so had. It is because while agricultural implements are ancient, primitive, neglected by the government, politicians and clergy are modern. Not having good roads, they buy expensive automobiles with public money. Not having own gasoline or oil or any metal, yet they buy military airships, guns, cannon. Have no own textiles, and yet uniforms of soldiers, police, and clergy are much more imposing and brighter than English or American. Taxation on everything, and high; while population have no bread and go hungry, yet government, for government revenue, does encourage whiskey drinking, cigarettes smoking and, third and worst evil— IDLENESS. Then, politicians, clergy, and officials treat people without any charity or mercy. For the smallest business one has to go to few officials and each one official, to show his authority or expecting a bribe, makes one to waste day or two and come again and again, etc., etc.
Dear Mr.―, seems like writing drifted to my ‘Inferno.’ Forgive me kindly for much writing and much bothering your noble mind.
Very respectfully thanking you much, I beg to remain,
Your humble and obedient servant,
P. J. R.

‘People of Refuge’ might be an apt shingle for the Country Lawyer as described by Mr. F. Lyman Windolph in the April Atlantic.

CHARLOTTE;, N. C,
DEAR ATLANTIC,-
If Lyman Windolph, attorney, feels that by such men and women as his farmer-client he, and his like, are saved hourly, one wonders with what ‘celestial light’ was not lie appareled to the farmer.
Would the farmer have ‘passed the time of day’ in his lawyer’s office unless he had felt sure that here he might bring his weariness, or his trifles, for consideration? A. S. M. Hutchinson has spoken about such People of Refuge. The aching thing in life is not to have where to take your weariness. Let who will receive your triumphs; to whom a man can take his heartache, that man walks near the Godhead! No. The farmer did not save the lawyer. Like all blessed redeemers, Lyman Windolph saves his universe — and himself — merely by being in it, so great is his charity.
And one may be sure that there is an unpassing glory about him and the world that he lives in. When his client went out of his office and touched April soil again, there had not passed away a glory from ‘ meadow, grove, and stream ’ because there was not the same steady satisfaction in his friend.
No ‘beauty of human relationship’ is at all possible where there is not a great charity in the heart of him, or her, who sits at the desk, be he lawyer, banker, doctor, or whonot. The writer recalls with deep gratitude the swiftness and concern with which a young trust officer pushed her into a private office: he was going to spare her the ignominy of weeping in public.
‘It’s the set of the sail,’ as the old saying goes, that determines the course of the ship. Likewise, the profession has less to do with the character of any relation than the temper of soul in the persons involved. A colleague of mine insists that there’s no difference between a dentist and a barber. And yet I have remembered for years various quiet conversations with my dentist — yes, actually — who has great art, certainly, but a greater charity.
The late Dr. Root of Oberlin College told me of a colored man who walked into his library and asked for a book on architecture. Instead of showing him the card catalogue, or being indifferent to his request, Dr. Root asked him what phase of architecture lie was interested in. Cathedrals, or public buildings? Imagine the shock he had when the man stammered that he wanted to build a henhouse! Yet the wonderful Dr. Root did not guffaw; instead he brought him a book on poultry.
If, when all things apparently have worked together for evil and one is suffering from the arrows of a particularly outrageous fortune, he has where to take his problem — real or imaginary (it’s very real to him) —then things again make sense. Consultation about a plough, a tooth, or an investment may be sacrament,
To remember for years,
To remember with tears —
and who shall say how far either person is from the Vision Beatific?
Yours very truly,
RENA C. HARRELL

Tolstoy and death.

DEAR ATLANTIC, -
Robert Keable may have been reading Tolstoy! In chapter twelve of his Confession occur the following words; —
‘Then I looked at myself, at what was going on within me, and I recalled those deaths and revivals which had taken place within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I lived only when I believed in God. As it had been before, so it was even now: I needed only to know about God and I lived: I needed to forget and not believe in him, and I died.
‘What, then, are these revivals and deaths? Certainly I do not live when I lose my faith in the existence of God; I should have killed myself long ago, if I had not had the dim hope of finding him. “So what else am I looking for? ” a voice called out within me. “Here he is. He is that without which one cannot live. To know God and live is one and the same thing. God is life."'
Very truly yours,
IRVING HARRIS