G. NATURAL HISTORY AND ZOOLOGY. o 2:J 



We have already referred to the discovery by Mr. J. H. 

 Klippart often complete skeletons of the fossil peccary; and 

 while excavating for an extension of the walls of the peniten- 

 tiary at Columbus last summer, the lower jaw of a fossil horse 

 was found. Of this there were four teeth, and, according to 

 Mr. Klippart, some of them were three and a half inches long, 

 and about an inch square. This jaw was found about half a 

 mile from the locality that supplied the peccaries' skeletons 

 (Platj/gowus comjiressus), and in the same geological drift 

 period. 



THE VELOCITY OF NERVOUS TRANSMISSION". 



Exner has investigated the time that elapses between the 

 reception of an impression on the brain and the voluntary 

 movement made by the body in response thereto. This, 

 which he calls the reaction time, amounts to one ninth of a 

 second in the case where the eye receives and the hand an- 

 swers to the impression, and the time increases with increas- 

 ing intensity of the exciting cause producing the impression. 

 In order to investigate the similar question with reference to 

 involuntary movements of the body, he experiments upon the 

 winking of the eyelids. His observations are made by at- 

 taching a self-recording apparatus to one of the upper eyelids, 

 and he obtains from these investigations the reflex time that 

 is to say, the time in which the involuntary action follows 

 the reception of any impression. Exner concludes that the 

 reflex time is not a constant, but is smaller in the case of 

 strong exciting causes, as is also the case with the reaction 

 time; and, again, that the magnitude of the reflex time, in 

 general, differs only very slightly from the reaction time. 

 19 C, 1874, 155. 



ACTION OF THE POISON OF EGYPTIAN SERPENTS. 



A paper was read by Professor Panceri, before the Egyp- 

 tian Institute of Cairo, relating to his experiments on the ac- 

 tion of the poison of Egyptian serpents, in which he presented 

 the conclusion that two animals onlv, the ichneumon and 

 Mephitis libyca, are able to resist large doses of the poison of 

 the naja and the ceraste, so that in ordinary cases they may 

 be considered as invulnerable to these serpents. These re- 

 sults are thought possibly to account for the veneration in 



