(Pieris brassicae L) in den Vereinigten Staaten. Warum also nicht auch die Nützlinge?

Mr. A. D. Hopkins that wohl sehr gut, sein Augenmerk auf Europa zu richten.

Und in der That haben wir in Clerus formicarius L. einen Käfer, der nicht nur in seinem Aeusseren, in Grösse und Färbung, seinem amerikanischen Bruder, Clerus dubius F., überaus ähnelt, sondern dem Letzteren auch in seinen Lebensgewohnheiten gleicht. Er ist, sowohl als Larve, wie als Imago, ein scharfer Feind der Nadelholz-Borkenkäfer, gleichviel ob sie auf Kiefer oder Tanne leben, und dabei recht zahlreich.

Diesen wählte Mr. Hopkins zur Einführung nach Amerika. Um sein Ziel sicher zu erreichen, setzte er sich mit dem durch seine klassische Monographie berühmten Scolytiden-Specialisten Eichhoff und mit mir in Verbindung und kam im August nach Europa, hier die Lebensbedingungen des Thieres zu studiren und zu sammeln.

Mr. Eichhoff schrieb mir, während Herr Hopkins im Elsass sammelte, dass derselbe "mit seltenem Geschick und grossem Glück" arbeite, und ich selbst konnte dies sehr bald aus eigener Anschauung bestätigen, als ich mit Mr. Hopkins gemeinschaftlich mehrere Tage in den sächsischen Wäldern auf Cleriden fahndete. Wir fanden die Larve in allen Stadien des Wachsthumes, die Puppe, die eben entschlüpfte Imago, und den kräftigen, lebhaften Käfer in ihrem kunstvollen Winterquartieren innerhalb der Rinde.

So kann denn Mr. Hopkins zufrieden auf den Erfolg seiner Reise blicken, denn er nahm eine stattliche Zahl Cleriden in allen Stadien, der Sicherheit halber in vertchiedener Weise verpackt, mit nach Hause. Und da es wohl keinem Zweifel unterliegt, dass der weitaus grössere Theil der in der Winterruhe befindlichen Thiere gesund ankommt,-wenn nicht übertriebene Cholerafurcht etwa Herrn Hopkins Schätze durch Disinfection verdirbt,-so kann im Frühjahre mit dem Acclimatisations versuche begonnen werden.

Für genugenden Nachschub wird von mir eventuell gesorgt werden, um Mr. Hopkins's Experiment gelingen zu lassen.

COLIAS EDUSA AND COLIAS HYALE.

BY A. HEATH, LONDON, ENGLAND.

GREAT BRITAIN this year has been favored with an abundance of these beautiful insects; from every part come reports of innumerable captures, especially of C. Edusa, many insects being taken at one throw of the net. C. Hyale has also been, I may say, plentiful when we consider its comparative rarity here; friends of mine report taking during a few days as many as four or six this season. I have myself taken four fine specimens in as many days. The first specimen I took in June, but it was the only example of Colias that I saw until August; as a rule these insects are never taken in England until August. In 1886 we had a similar year; enormous numbers of C. edusa were to be seen, one entomological friend told me he had seen a certain field in Kent yellow with them. It seems most extraordinary that this year we should have had such an abundance of this particular insect, when last year scarcely one was to be seen even in their favorite localities.

Some entomologists believe that they come across the English Channel (over 20 miles of water) in swarms, but if this were the case, surely someone would see them arrive or on their arrival before they scattered over the country. Then, if this were so, why do we not get an annual visit in quantity? The insect is always in abundance on the continent of Europe, and there is also an abundance of many other kinds of butterflies that we seldom or never see here. My idea respecting these occasional abundant swarms is that butterflies' eggs are indestructible, and will lie on the ground for years until a favorable season arrives.

The eggs of Colias are laid on the food-plant, various forms of Trifolium; this is not only their food, but the food of every kind of four-footed animal, domestic and otherwise, inhabiting this country (except carnivora), and the whole field or crop of Trifolium is eaten either in a green or dry state. What, then, be

comes of the eggs deposited? They must be eaten up almost entirely, and if not indestructible they would be destroyed. This seems not to be the case, and it is probable that they can pass through the animal uninjured by the heat of its body, and so be again distributed over the ground. Without some such theory it seems almost impossible to account for the large numbers found in a cultivated country following a year of scarcity like last year, especially when we remember the enormous number of larvæ destroyed by ichneumon and other countless enemies, bad seasons, etc.

NOTES AND NEWS.

THE New York Academy of Sciences has recently organized a biological section which will hold monthly meetings. At the opening meeting, Oct. 17, Professor Henry F. Osborn acted as chairman. The following papers were presented. Bashford Dean, "On Dionæa under its Native Conditions near Wilmington, N.C.," the results of experiments emphasizing the plant's erratic sensibility and its special adaptability for capturing ground insects; N. L. Britton, "On a species of Hieracium;" E. B. Wilson, "On the Artificial Production of Twins and Multiple Embryos in Amphioxus.' The paper dealt mainly with the peculiarities of double monsters produced (as in Driesch's experiments on Echinus) by shaking apart the blastomeres of two- and fourcelled stages (v. Anatomischer Anzeiger, 1892). Every gradation exists between two perfect and separate bodies, each half the normal size, and four in which the only indication of duality consists of a bilobed condition of the archenteron. In the double gastrulas the long axes of the two halves may form any angle with each other, and the two blastopores when separate may be turned in any direction. In cases where the two blastopores face each other, the two bodies are united by a bridge of tissue at one side, essentially as in the double gastrulas of certain earthworms.

--

- As cotton-seed meal is gradually coming into use in Ohio as a valuable adjunct to the ration for dairy cows, and as the scarcity and consequent high price of corn the present season may tempt some farmers to add this meal to the pig ration, it seems advisable to call attention to bulletin 21 of the Texas experiment station (located at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, College Station P. O.). In this bulletin Director G. D. Curtis reports the results of a long series of experiments in feeding cotton-seed to pigs, from which he comes to the conclusion that there is no profit whatever in feeding cotton-seed in any form to pigs, whether the seed be boiled, roasted, or ground. The ground seed seems to have produced the worst results, causing the death within six to eight weeks of a large proportion of the pigs to which it was fed, and especially of the medium and small-sized shoats. The boiled seed was less injurious, but roasted seed was almost as fatal as the meal. These pigs were fed alongside of similar pigs which had corn instead of cotton-seed, and the cornfed pigs remained in perfect health. The symptoms produced by the cotton-seed are described as follows: The first sign of sickness, appearing in from six to eight weeks after cotton-seed meal is added to the ration, is a moping dullness of the animal, with loss of appetite and tendency to lie apart. Within the course of twelve to thirty-six hours, often within the shorter time, the animal becomes restless; staggering in his gait; breathing labored and spasmodic; bare skin showing reddish inflammation; sight defective, and both the nervous and the muscular systems feeble and abnormal in action. The fatal cases all show "thumps❞— spasmodic breathing, and in many instances the animal will turn in one direction only, following a fence, or building wall, so closely as to strike his nose against projections in a vain endeavor to push outward in that one direction which he tries to take. If no fence or building intercept him he may travel in a circlelarge or small according to the mildness or acuteness of the malady in his particular case. When exhausted by his efforts the animal drops down suddenly - sometimes flat upon his belly, sometimes dropping on his haunches with his fore legs well apart to keep from falling over — almost always with the evidence of more or less acute internal pain. At death a quantity of bloody foam exudes from mouth and nostrils.

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WHY IS SEA-WATER SALT?

BY W. MATTIEU WILLIAMS, F.R.A.S., F.C.S., LONDON, ENGLAND. THIS question has been regarded as a mystery and has given rise to some curious speculations, but a little consideration of the subject must, I think, satisfy us all that it would be very wonderful, quite incomprehensible, if the waters of the ocean were otherwise than salt as they are.

The following explanation was first suggested to myself many years ago when receiving my first lessons in practical chemical analysis. The problem then to be solved was the separation of the bases dissolved in water by precipitating them, one by one, in a solid condition; filtering away the water from the first, then from this filtrate precipitating the second, and so on, until all were separated or accounted for.

But in doing this there was one base that was always left to the last, on account of the difficulty of combining it with any acid that would form a solid compound, a difficulty so great that its presence was determined by a different method. This base is soda, the predominating base of sea-salt, where it is combined with hydrochloric acid. Not only is soda the most soluble of all the mineral bases, but the mineral acid with which it is combined forms a remarkably soluble series of salts, the chlorides. Thus the primary fact concerning the salinity of sea-water is that it has selected from among the stable chemical elements the two which form the most soluble compounds. Among the earthy bases is one which is exceptionally soluble,- that is, magnesia,— and this stands next to soda in its abundance in sea-water.

Modern research has shown that the ocean contains in solution nearly every element that exists upon the earth, and that these elements exist in the water in proportions nearly corresponding to the mean solubility of their various compounds. Thus gold and silver and most of the other heavy metals are found to exist there. Sonnenstadt found about 14 grains of gold to the ton of sea-water, or a dollar's worth in less than two tons.

As the ocean covers all the lower valleys of the earth, it receives all the drainage from the whole of the exposed land. This drainage is the rain-water that has fallen upon this exposed surface, has flowed down its superficial slopes, or has sunk into porous land, and descended under-ground. In either case the water must dissolve and carry with it any soluble matter that it meets, the quantity of solid matter which is thus appropriated being proportionate to its solubility and the extent of its exposure to the solvent. Rain when it falls upon the earth is distilled water nearly pure (its small impurities being what it obtains from the air), but river-water when it reaches the ocean contains measura

ble quantities of dissolved mineral and vegetable matter. These small contributions are ever pouring in and ever accumulating. This continual addition of dissolved mineral salts without any corresponding abstraction by evaporation has been going on ever since the surface of the earth has consisted of land and water.

An examination of the composition of other bodies of water, which, like the ocean, receive rivers or rivulets and have no other outlet than that afforded by evaporation, confirms this view. All of these are more or less saline, many of them more so than the ocean itself. On the great Table Land of Asia, "the roof of the world," there is a multitude of small lakes which receive the waters of the rivers and rivulets of that region and have no outlet to the ocean. On a map they appear like bags with a string attached, the bag being the lake and the string the river. All these lakes are saline, many of them excessively so, simply because they are ever receiving river-water of slight salinity and ever giving off vapor which has no salinity at all. There is no wash through these lakes as in the great American lakes or those of Constance, Geneva, etc.

The Sea of Aral and the Caspian are lakes without any other outlet than evaporation, and they are saline accordingly. The Dead Sea, which receives the Jordan at one end and a multitude of minor rivers and rivulets at its other end and sides, is a noted example of extreme salinity. It is, as everybody knows, a sea or lake of brine. The total area of land draining into the great ocean does not exceed one-fourth of its own area, while the Dead Sea receives the drainage and soluble matter of an area above twenty times greater than its own, and thus it fulfils the demand of the above-stated theory by having far greater salinity than has the great ocean.

According to this view the salinity of the ocean must be steadily though very slowly increasing, and there must be slowly proceeding a corresponding adaptation or evolution among its inhabitants, both animal and vegetable. The study of this subject and the effect which the increasing salinity of the past must have had upon the progressive modifications of organic life displayed by fossils is, I think, worthy of more attention than it has hitherto received from palæontologists.

THE ENERGY-FUNCTION OF THE MAGNETIC CIRCUIT.

BY CHAS. P. STEINMETZ.

IN designing alternate-current electric motors, in October, 1890, I was confronted by the problem, to calculate the loss of energy caused by the reversals of magnetism in the iron of the motorfield. At that time very little was known on this phenomenon besides a few experimental data of Ewing. From these data mathematical analysis yielded the result that the loss of energy (by conversion into heat) during a complete cycle of magnetization is proportional to the 1.6 power of the intensity of magnetization, or magnetic induction, B; that is, can be expressed by the formula:

where H is the loss of energy per magnetic cycle, and 7 a "coefficient of hysteresis." This result was published in the Electrical Engineer, New York, December, 1890.

But it was not quite satisfactory, in so far as Ewing's determinations were made by the magnetometer method, with very slow cyclic variations of magnetism, and it was doubtful whether for very quick cycles, as they take place under the influence of an alternate-current of 100 or more complete periods per second. the same law holds, and especially the co-efficient of hysteresis, 7, is the same.

A great number of tests, made during the year 1891, partly by the three electrodynamometer method, partly by the use of the Eickemeyer differential magnetometer, and published in a paper read before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, January, 1892, proved that up to over 200 complete magnetic cycles per second the loss of energy per cycle - by conversion into heat - is constant and independent of the number of cycles per second, following the law of the 1.6 power; while, when under the influence of the alternating magnetism, Foucault - or eddy

cur.

that is, the magnetic resistance is a linear function of the fieldintensity.

On the hand of a large number of experimental determinations, made by the electro dynamometer and by the magnetometer method, comprising several thousands of readings, I was enabled to communicate to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers at the meeting of September, 1892, the results:

1. The loss of energy by molecular-magnetic friction, per cycle and cm3, for a cyclic variation of the magnetic induction between the limiting values L, and L,, is expressed by the function

Ho

H∞

a

=

=L, the maximum value of hysteretic loss, by means of the formulas :

The equations of magnetic resistance, or reluctance —

(corresponding to Ohm's Law in the electric circuit), and the energy-function —

(corresponding to the energy-function of the electric circuit, W = c 'R).

4. These equations hold for all kinds of iron and steel, for nickel, cobalt, and magnetite, and most likely for the amalgams of iron, that is, for all magnetic materials.

5. In first approximation, the magnetic induction, B, and the magnetic hysteresis, or molecular friction, H, depend upon the magnetic field-intensity, H, by the law of probability of molecular distances.

6. Average values of magnetic constants are: For wrought-iron, soft cast-steel, and mitis metal —

a=.38 x 10 σ = .055 x 10 for cast-iron and low-permeability cast-steel

a = 3 × 10 σ = .095 × 10 n = .013 (Hm = 22); for soft welded-steel and medium-hard cast-steel of high permeability

a = 1.7 x 10 for glass-hard steel

-3

Of the many myths prevalent regarding gold, the greatest one of all is its growth. Of course there are many interesting instances where ancient worked-ont galleries in mines are slowly closing up by the incrustation process, so that space long ago excavated is being filled with an accumulation resulting from the percolation of water through the adjacent wall-rock. This water has in chemical combination such minerals as iron, copper, sulphur, and the precious metals, which are deposited in the open crevice, making for a second time a mineralized body which will show by analysis the above named and many more minerals. In fact, I have had this actual experience resultant on the examination of an old gold mine in Honduras, Central America, that had been worked some time prior to any history we have of that country. This circumstance gave to the natives the idea that gold grew, and they so expressed themselves; while it seemed in the case of one individual a transmutation idea had permeated his head, for he explained that the green carbonate of copper was undergoing a change into silver, while the silver in turn would develop into gold.

In India I found a caste of mining people who believed that gold grew in the bottom of the large lakes situated in that country. They expressed no practical reason other than fairy-tale superstitions. And even in this country there are converts to the idea. I was much amused and interested some years ago to hear an intelligent acquaintance maintain in strong and not altogether religious terms that the stuff grew and he knew it." His experience was based on the fact that in a certain pile of tailings, resulting from the milling of heavy sulphuretted gold-ores, he had treated at one time several tons with no result. Again, in

three years time he discovered by a pan-test that the same pile had gold in it, whereupon he treated several tons with the approximate result of one dollar per ton. After this last treatment he declared the tailings were barren of gold so far as he could detect by the mechanical means at hand. In order to convince him I selected an average sample, which on assay gave 2 pennyweights, 20 grains gold per 2,000-pound ton. This was considered not worth the working. But my friend maintained that the gold would grow again in two or three years.

True to his word, in two years he was at the pile again, and by his crude but sure method was saving one dollar per ton from the ore that would yield nil by his methods two years before. Again, I took samples for assay and was somewhat surprised to find the value had increased just 50 per cent, as the result of my determination was 5 pennyweights, 16 grains per ton. On investigation, I found the sulphurets to be of a character readily decomposed by the elements; in fact to such an extent that, as I afterwards calculated, over one-half of the pile must have been decomposed or washed away, so that with the decomposition a certain rapid concentration was maintained by the action of heavy rains, and the natural advantage this particular ground offered causing the gold to remain behind while the oxides were carried away in suspension by the water. My explanation has failed to convince my friend of the pick and shovel. As the gold in the tailings has become about exhausted, his last attempt to make pay was a failure. He remains strong in the conviction that a few years will grow it again.

Gold Hill, North Carolina, October, 1892.

CURRENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY.-XVIII.

[Edited by D. G. Brinton, M.D., LL.D.]

The Early Age of Metals in Europe.

As has been previously remarked in these Notes, there is a growing tendency in European archæology to rate the civilization of Europe at the dawn of the historic period decidedly higher than has been heretofore supposed, and to regard it more and more of indigenous development. Those old theories which attributed pretty much all that deserved the name of culture to Asiatic or Egyptian sources are diminishing in favor.

An instance of this is seen in an article by M. Salomon Reinach in L'Anthropologie, 1892, No. 3, in which he discusses with his accustomed wealth of erudition the derivation of the name "Cassiterides," and with it the origin of tin and bronze in western Europe. He claims that this name is of Celtic origin, and means "Remote," or something of that kind. It was applied by the Gauls to the portion of western England whence came the tin. This conclusion proves several points, if once accepted. As Homer talks of the Cassiterides, it shows that before his time the tribes of western France spoke Celtic; that they worked in and exported metals; and it gives room to inquire whether one of the centres of the discovery of bronze was not in western Europe.

Other archæologists of ability, such as Franz von Pulszky, in the Archiv für Anthropologie, Bd., XX., have called attention to the fact that the specific civilization of the Celts was higher than is generally recognized. Their heavy iron swords, for striking, not thrusting, their ornamentation, derived from the circle and the triangle, and their use of torques, wound metal neck-rings, reveal positive ethnic art-capacity. Their presence in Hungary is well marked by such remains in the tombs of an early epoch. Figurines of the Stone Age.

The glyptic art goes back far into the stone age, far even into the old or rough stone age. In the Antiqua for 1887-1890, R. Ferrer has discussed and depicted the earliest human statuettes from the European bronze and stone ages. The oldest always represent the individual naked, and the parts of sex very prominent. This is also the case with the Phoenician bronze figurines from Ellora, in Portugal, while those from the north are clothed. Last December there were found some interesting remains near Brunn, Germany, at a depth of four and a half meters, amid bones of the mammoth, rhinoceros, and reindeer. They

were a human skull, and adjacent to it a human figurine 20 centimeters high, carved from the tooth of a mammoth, and bored through, evidently for the purpose of suspension. The figure is naked and prominently masculine, though the mammæ are clearly represented.

The skull presented an index of 65.68, and was therefore singularly dolichocephalic; its estimated cubical capacity was 1,350 cubic centimeters; it was not prognathic, but the frontal sinuses were very prominent, and the glabella also, thus presenting an inferior character.

When the head of the figurine is regarded in profile, it presents this peculiar appearance of prominence in the glabellar region, thus showing that it was carved to imitate the then prevailing type of humanity.

These and other interesting facts about this noteworthy find are given in the Proceedings of the Niederrheinische Gesellschaft, 1892, by Professor Schaaffhausen of Bonn, who adds an engraving of the skull. Like all his articles, this one is prepared with the most satisfactory care.

The Study of Hair.

The study of the hair on man offers a most extensive field of inquiry, and one which presents many unsolved problems of the first order of importance. Some of these are discussed by F. Lapille in Le Naturaliste and by Dr. Bartels in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie of recent dates.

Why man as a species should present the amount and kind of hair that he does is variously explained, and the differences between the varieties of the human race are so great in this respect that, as is well known, one of the most popular subdivisions of the species is founded upon it. Most mammals have more bair than man, but some less, as the Cetacea and the Sirenidæ. The anthropoid apes have, as a rule, much hair where man has little, as in the arm-pits and around the sex-organs. In some localities, as the ears and nose, the hairs are clearly protective organs, while around the genitals they appear to be merely ornamental. In monkeys, the females are bearded, but such examples are rare in the human species. Bearded women, however, are not otherwise masculine, but have the sentiments and the capacity for motherhood. Bartels describes a very hairy Gypsy girl, only seventeen years old, but already the mother of three children. With her the hairiness was from a naevus pigmentosus of extraordinary extent; and why these naevi should develop hairs is worth inquiry. Man has the longest hair of any animal, and why he lost it over most of his body is the subject of much curious speculation. The loss led him to the inventions of painting and tattooing his body, of covering it with clay or clothes, to depilation, to the sense of modesty, and to many other unexpected results. The history of hair in man is thus an extraordinary one for the evolution of the species.

On Quarry-Rejects.

For two or three years past there has been in the air — I mean the air which archæologists breathe - a low but menacing sound, threatening some dear theories and tall structures, built, if not on sand, at least on gravels offering a scarcely more secure foundation.

These menaces bear more directly on what is classically known as the "old stone age," that of chipped implements, and particularly on that period of it which is alleged to be characterized by very rude and which are therefore supposed to be very old — types. The new views come from a study of the aboriginal quarries, the sites where the ancient tribes collected the materials which later and at other localities they worked up into finely chipped or polished implements. This part of the work they did not perform at the quarry; and pieces which after a few testblows by their skilled hands they saw could not be utilized at all, or only at the cost of considerable labor, they threw aside and left on the spot. These are " quarry-rejects,” and after you have handled and studied several hundreds of them you can always see why they were thrown away; you can recognize, as did the aboriginal artist, why they would prove worthless or troublesome in further working.

Now the alarming discovery has been made that a great many of what we have heretofore called “palæolithic implements" display with fatal clearness the peculier earmarks of these “quarryrejects," hinting, therefore, that they never were real implements at all. What is worse, like the rejects, they show no signs of use, and clearly never could have been employed as implements, and consequently do not in any way illustrate the industry of the chippers, no matter of what age they are. If found in gravels, the gravel-bed was the quarry, and they the refuse. It has even been hinted that the famed gravels of the Somme and the "palæolithic floors" of the Thames and the "Trenton gravels" of our own land, may have to lose their laurels in the light of this discovery.

The Builders of the Southern Mounds.

Those who have looked at the archæological collections of the Smithsonian with any attention, cannot fail to remember the extraordinary specimens of copper work from the Etowah valley mounds, in northern Georgia. The figures they delineate have an unquestionable family resemblance with those inscribed on shells obtained on the lower Mississippi, so accurately presented in Mr. Holmes's essay in the Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-81. Both present curious analogies to Mexican and Maya art, and I have been almost constrained to believe in a connection, either ethnic or commercial, between these peoples.

Dr. Eduard Seler, however, who is a most competent authority on these questions, expresses a different opinion in a recent article in Globus, Bd. LXII., No. 11. He analyzes with care the mode of wearing the hair, the headdress, the clothing, and the weapons of the figures, and shows that in several of these points they correspond with the descriptions of the early voyagers of the natives they found in these localities. He also compares the same features with similar relics from ancient mounds in the Ohio valley. The conclusions he reaches are, that the builders of the Etowah mounds and the artists of the inscribed shells were probably related to the builders of the Ohio mounds; that they were not the direct ancestors of the tribes found in Georgia at the discovery; that there is not sufficient reason to suppose connection with Mexico or Yucatan; that probably the mound-building and copperworking tribes were destroyed or driven to the remote sea-coast by invasions from the north and west at a period not very remote from that of the discovery of the continent.

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"Ancient Mexican Heraldry."

PERMIT me to place before the readers of Science an interesting fact kindly communicated to me on Oct. 17 by the Rev John Woodward, LL.D., F.S. A., the learned author of A Treatise on Heraldry, British and Foreign," referred to in my article on "Ancient Mexican Heraldry" in Science, No. 503, Sept 23. That gentleman has just informed me "that the late Mr. Ellis, in his book on The Antiquities of Heraldry,' 1869, made reference to the Armory of the Ancient Mexicans and gave a plate (iv.) of the symbols from the works of Lord Kingsborough and Mr. Stephens." "There is not, however," my courteous correspondent adds, " any evidence that the use of such devices was hereditary; they were, so far as we know, merely personal distinctions" This agrees with the general conclusions, based on special investigations, of Mrs. Zelia Nuttall, who was doubtless, like myself, unaware of the publication of Mr. William Smith- Ellis's views on Mexican heraldic emblems nearly a quarter of a century ago. I endeavored in vain to consult a copy of his work when studying the subject of my communication to Science; and, as other students may experience the same difficulty, I will reproduce the Rev. J. Woodward's observations respecting ancient heraldry on page 26 of the Introduction to Vol. I. of his recent Treatise on Heraldry in general.

"Mr. W. G. (sic) Ellis, in his 'Antiquities of Heraldry,' has collected a mass of interesting matter relating to what he calls the heraldry of ancient times and of all nations of the world, and he certainly succeeds in showing to how great an extent pictorial symbols, which had originally a meaning, have been in use among all nations of mankind, civilized and savage. His plates are curious as showing the occasional occurrence among these manifold devices of some resembling modern figures of blazon. The crescent, the mullet, the lozenge, the quatrefoil, and the fleur de lis are traced by him to counterparts existing among Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, and Japanese emblems; and among the figures on Etruscan vases he shows us what, in heraldic language, would be called a bull's head caboshed and a not unheraldic-looking demi-boar."

Furthermore, it is noteworthy that the Rev. John Woodward considers there is some reason to believe that the use of the hereditary badge must have long preceded hereditary heraldry" (p. 589). Additional instances of their use as military distinctions rewarding the capture of prisoners in European warfare may be cited from his interesting work. Two fleur de lis with other "augmentations were granted to Sir John Clerke because he took captive Louis Duke de Longueville on the field of Therouenne, better known as the battle of the Spurs, and fought a month before the eventful fight of Flodden. A still more interesting case is that of the "Crampet," or metal termination of the scabbard of the sword, sometimes borne as a device. One was assigned to Sir Roger La Warr about the same time as the buckle was granted to Sir John Pelham in recognition of his aid in the capture of King John of France. It is somewhat remarkable that the descendants of these gallant knights, who fought side by side at Poictiers, still hold lands and earldoms in the same County of Sussex. Some members of the ancient house of De la Warr passed over to America in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, hence the more familiar name of Delaware. AGNES CRANE.

Brighton, England, Oct. 21.

Reticulated Protoplasm of Pelomyxa.

SINCE the publication of Dr. Stokes's article myself and colleague, Mr. W. F. Pentland, have had several opportunities of examining Pelomyxa Palustris. The difficulties of the investigation are so great that at his suggestion I tabulate the methods and their results.

1. Examination of unstained preparations (50 slides). Utterly useless as far as the detection of reticulation is concerned. 2. After treatment with osmic acid, usually 1 per cent solution, one organism was found destitute to a great extent of ingested material. An Powell and Leland water-immersion and Zeiss 12 compensating occular failed even with critical light, with an immersion condenser, and ammonia sulphate of copper solution as modifier, to detect the slightest trace of reticulation. 3. In the same preparation we found some Amoeboe resembling Proteus. The coarseness of the enclosure in these specimens we found would lead a neophyte astray, as it frequently resembled reticulation. 4. Determined to leave no stone unturned, we tried the usual aniline and carmine dyes, with no result. 5. One-half per cent solution of chloride of gold (no osmic acid) was tried on over twelve slides. I must certainly confess I glimpsed reticulation in two specimens, but owing to the protracted investigation was compelled to desist.

So far with regard to amoebic organisms. It is in the field of pathology that reticulation of protoplasm is most frequently observed, as far as my experience goes. The more rapid the morbid process the greater certainty of reticulation. Fifteen years ago I was working with my lamented colleague, Dr. Bookey of Dublin, on the effects of bichloride of mercury on blood corpuscles; but fortunately we did not follow out Dr. Klein's suggestions to the letter, as we found epithelium cells beautifully reticulated as described by Dr. Stokes. We found the nucleus in the blood discs, but, as usual in scientific investigations, forgot to look for reticulation. However, on a future occasion the late Sir Robert Macdonald submitted to us for examination a portion of tumor of then unknown nature. The portion was placed in Muller's