428 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



but, if not helped, he would glance at the 

 dishes around him with an impatient murmur, 

 and try to attract the attention of the wait- 

 ers with a cough or by touching them. If 

 he drank out of a vessel which he could not 

 lift, he would bend down to it without touch- 

 ing it with his hands or disturbing it. He 

 was particularly neat, seemed annoyed if any- 

 thing fell upon him or stuck to him, and 

 would pick it off carefully, or would hold 

 up his hands and let some person pick it 

 off ; he was free from odors, and was very 

 fond of playing and splashing around in 

 the water. His most prominent individual 

 peculiarities were good humor and cun- 

 ning. If punished, he never resented it, but 

 would lock his feet together and look up 

 with an expression that disarmed all ill 

 feeling. When he wanted anything, he 

 could make his wish known as expressively 

 and persuasively as any child. If it was 

 not granted he would not give it up, bift 

 would wait for his chance with every evi- 

 dence that he had a plan in his head. Thus, 

 if he wanted to go out, and was refused, he 

 would seem to submit and lie down in as- 

 sumed indifference not far from the door, 

 raising his head occasionally to see if his 

 opportunity had come, and would gradually 

 draw nearer to the door, keeping careful 

 watch all the time, and at last would go 

 out so quickly that no one could stop him. 

 Whenever he intended to steal sugar or fruit 

 from the cupboard, he would keep looking 

 in the opposite direction till he was not ob- 

 served, and then would go directly to the 

 cupboard, open the door, and, having shut it 

 behind him, would take out carefully what- 

 ever he wanted and eat it as quickly as pos- 

 sible. If detected, he would run away, and 

 his whole demeanor would indicate that he 

 knew he was doing what was forbidden. He 

 took great pleasure in drumming on hollow 

 things, and seldom let an opportunity pass 

 of doing so. Unaccustomed noises were an- 

 noying to him. Thunder, the pattering of 

 the rain on the awnings of the ship, the 

 sound of the trumpet and the pipe, gave 

 him so much pain that it was an act of 

 merey to get him out of hearing of them 

 as quickly as possible. Mpungu declined 

 after he was taken to Europe, and died in 

 a little more than two years after he was 

 caught. 



The Stone-Grains in Frnlt. Henry Po- 



lonie considers, in " Kosmos," the nature of 

 the gritty particles in pears and other fruits 

 of the apple family. Each of these bodies 

 consists of several cells which may be called 

 stone-cells, and which have walls of consid- 

 erable strength, traversed by canals. The 

 stone-cells are widely distributed through 

 the vegetable kingdom, and form an essen- 

 tial part of the framework of many plants. 

 In these cases they perform mechanical 

 functions, as they do also in grapes or stone 

 fruits, where they form strong walls protect- 

 ing the seed. The mechanical office does 

 not, however, appear in the pear, for the 

 stone-grains are scattered irregularly in the 

 pulp of the fruit. M. Polonie suggests that 

 they may be the rudimentary remains of a 

 stone casing to the seeds of some ancestor 

 of our present cultivated and wild pears. It 

 is in favor of this theory that the stony 

 pear -grains are not evenly distributed 

 through the whole fruit, but are thickest iR 

 a zone surrounding the seeds, and where we 

 should expect to find the shell of the stone 

 if the pear was a proper stone-fruit. By 

 bringing together the different varieties of 

 cultivated and wild or wood pears, we might 

 arrange a series of fruits in regular grada- 

 tion, from a luscious pear with hardly any 

 stony grains down to a tough wood-pear, in 

 which these grains would be so close as ta 

 touch each other all around. If the latter 

 pear is dried, the stony surrounding becomes 

 so hard that it is difficult to cut through it. 

 M. Polonie has found this to be the case 

 with certain wild pears which he has ob- 

 served. This theory is also supported by 

 the analogy of certain genera related to the 

 pear whose fruits inclose stones, as the med- 

 lar, which has fine stony seeds ; certain spe- 

 cies of thorn, in which the seeds are merged 

 into one kernel surrounded by a stony en- 

 velope, and some exotic genera, as the East 

 Indian stranaesia, in which all the seeds are 

 surrounded by a common stony envelope. 

 The quince has also gritty particles, which 

 are distributed similarly with those of the 

 pear ; and a quince from the shores of the 

 Caspian Sea, which is preserved in the her- 

 barium at Berlin, has its stone-grains thickly 

 grouped in a hard mass surrounding the 

 seeds, like the wood-pears mentioned by M. 

 Polonie. 



