NOTES. 



719 



of the brain, in consequence, probably, of 

 the increased flow of blood into the veins of 

 the thoracic cavity ; the increase of volume 

 in the brain, when it takes place, is, on the 

 contrary, due to a more abundant flow of 

 arterial blood to the encephalus. 



NOTES. 



According to Professor Cope's " Re- 

 view," members of the order of Rodentia 

 were very abundant during the White River 

 and Truckee (Miocene) epochs in North 

 America. They are referable to thirty-one 

 species and eight genera, of which three 

 genera Sciurus, Hcspcromys, and Lepus 

 still exist in the regions where their fossil re- 

 mains are found. All the species belong to 

 the three great divisions of the order which 

 now inhabit North America, while the fourth 

 division, Hystricomorpha, now very sparingly 

 represented on the continent, has not been 

 detected in the formations in question, but 

 appears in a single species of porcupine in 

 the Loup Fork bed. None of the species 

 are of larger size than their modern repre- 

 sentatives, while the beavers, squirrels, and 

 rabbits are smaller. 



M. de Quatrefages has called attention 

 to a story told in the " Histoire de la Loui- 

 siane " by M. Le Page du Pratz, of a Yazoo 

 Indian named Moncatch Ape, who, before 

 the year 1720, made a journey to the upper 

 Missouri, thence over to the head-waters of 

 the Columbia, in regions then wholly un- 

 known to white men. Reaching a tribe of 

 the Pacific coast, he learned that the In- 

 dians were visited regularly every year by 

 white men with long, black beards, who 

 came in fleets of thirty pirogues or more. 

 They were described as stout and short, with 

 large heads covered with cloth, their coats 

 coming down to the middle of their legs, 

 which, with their feet, were covered with a 

 red or yellow dress. Their arms made a 

 great noise and a great fire. M. de Quatre- 

 fages believes that those visitors may be 

 identified with the Loo-Choo Islanders. 



Professor Riley has described a new 

 imported insect which has been found prey- 

 ing upon the clover-fields at Barrington, 

 New York. Its damages were first observed 

 in the latter part of April, when small 

 patches of clover showed the leaves to be 

 badly eaten, and increased till the end of 

 July, when acres of the clover were ruined. 

 The insect continued to lay its eggs till Oc- 

 tober, a part of them outside the plant, but 

 most of them inside of the old and hollow 

 stems. The insect is a beetle, known as the 

 Phytonomus punctalus. 



Governor John Pope IIennessy, of Hong- 

 Kong, gives a good account of the success 

 which has attended the faithful practice of 

 vaccination among the Chinese of that col- 

 ony and the neighboring mainland. No 

 port in the world is more liable to a visita- 

 tion of small-pox ; yet the disease never 

 spreads at Hong-Kong. The health-officer 

 of the colony, noticing that nearly all the 

 young Chinese emigrants had vaccination or 

 inoculation-marks on their arms, learned on 

 inquiry that the doctors of the Tung-wa 

 Hospital a native charitable institution 

 practice vaccination upon their countrymen 

 in the colony, and send travelling vaccina- 

 tors over the adjoining provinces of China, 

 using lymph supplied them by the British 

 Colonial Office. 



Mr. M. E. Wadsworth, in a communica- 

 tion to the Boston Society of Natural His- 

 tory, has given his reasons for believing 

 that the iron-ores of the Marquette district, 

 Lake Superior, are of eruptive, and not of 

 sedimentary origin, as has been commonly 

 held. He rests his conclusions upon the 

 fact that the jaspilite and iron-ore in this 

 district, while they offer no characters in- 

 consistent with those which known erup- 

 tive rocks have, " possess characters which 

 eruptive rocks exhibit, especially in relation 

 to other rocks, and which no sedimentary 

 rock, proved to be such, has been known to 

 have." The particular facts supporting this 

 view are given in the paper. 



Mb. P. IIoglan has made experiments 

 toward ascertaining whether calomel is liable 

 to decomposition in the human system, with 

 the production of corrosive sublimate. He 

 has found that calomel may be slowly de- 

 composed and corrosive sublimate formed 

 by the action of water at the temperature of 

 the body, and that the change is accelerated 

 by the presence of citric acid, sodium chlo- 

 ride, or sugar. 



The geological formations of Schuylkill 

 County, Pennsylvania, embrace, according to 

 Mr. P. W. Sheaf er's monograph on the sub- 

 ject, the rocks, with an exception or two, 

 from the Oneida conglomerate (Upper Silu- 

 rian) to the coal-measures. The only forma- 

 tion of importance for its mineral wealth is 

 the last. It rests upon the Pottsville con- 

 glomerate (Millstone Grit), which has served 

 as a barrier to protect the coal-deposits from 

 erosion, and which varies in thickness from 

 675 to 1,030 feet. The coal-bearing strata 

 are 3,000 feet thick at their thickest point, 

 and include, perhaps, thirty coal-beds, of 

 which fifteen are workable and over three 

 feet thick, giving a total of 107 feet of coal. 

 The series can be separated into three divis- 

 ions by the color of the ash of the coals : a 

 lower or white-ash group, a middle or gray- 

 ash group, and an upper or red-ash group, 



