FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



863 



of frogs for thirty years, and found that they 

 are night wanderers, keeping comparatively 

 quiet during the day and seeking their prey 

 after dark. In the fall they leave their hunt- 

 ing grounds in the fields and woods and take 

 refuge near swamps and ponds, passing the 

 winter in the banks of rivers or the mud in 

 the bottoms of ponds, whence they come out 

 in the spring, when the process of reproduc- 

 tion begins. The frog is not sexually mature 

 till it is four or five years old. The coupling 

 process lasts from three to thirty days. Be- 

 tween its spring wakening and spawning the 

 frog eats nothing except, perhaps, its own 

 skin, which it moults periodically. After 

 spawning, frogs leave the water and go to 

 the fields and woods. They can be fed, when 

 kept captive, upon insects and earthworms. 



NOTES. 



A relation has been discovered by Pro- 

 fessor Dolbear and Carl A. and Edward A. 

 Bessey between the chirping of crickets and 

 the temperature, the chirps increasing as fre- 

 quently as the temperature rises. The Bes- 

 seys relate, in The Ameiican Naturalist, that 

 when, one cool evening, a cricket was caught 

 and brought into a warm room, it began in 

 a few minutes to chirp nearly twice as rap- 

 idly as the out-of-door crickets, and that its 

 rate very nearly conformed to the observed 

 rate maintained other evenings out of doors 

 under the same temperature conditions. 



C. Drieberg, of Colombo, Ceylon, records, 

 in Nature, a rainfall at Nedunkeni, in the 

 northern province of Ceylon, December 15 

 and 16, 1697, of 31.76 inches in twenty-four 

 hours. The highest previous records, as 

 cited by him, are at Joyeuse, France, 31.17 

 inches in twenty-two hours ; Genoa, 30 

 inches in twenty-six hours ; on the hills 

 above Bombay, 24 inches in one night ; and 

 on the Khasia Hills, India, 30 inches in each 

 of five successive days. The average annual 

 rainfall at Nedunkeni has been 64.70 inches, 

 but in 1897 the total amount was 121.85 

 inches. The greatest annual rainfall is on 

 the Khasia Hills, India, with 600 inches. 

 The wettest station in Ceylon is Padupola, 

 in the central province, with 230.85 inches 

 as the mean of twenty-six years, but in 1897 

 the amount was 243.07 inches. 



The Korean postage stamps are printed 

 in the United States. As explained in the 

 United States consular reports, they are of 

 four denominations, and all alike except in 

 color and denomination. Of the inscrip- 

 tions, the characters on the top are ancient 

 Chinese, and those at the bottom, having the 

 same meaning, are Korean ; the characters 

 on the right are Korean and those on the 



left are Chinese, both giving the denomina- 

 tions, with the English translation just below 

 the center of the stamp. The plum blossom 

 in each corner is the royal flower of the pres- 

 ent Ye dynasty, which has been in existence 

 more than five hundred years, and the fig- 

 ures at the corners of the center piece repre- 

 sent the four spirits that stand at the corners 

 of the earth and support it on their shoulders. 

 The national emblem in the center is an an- 

 cient Chinese phallic device. 



A paragraph in La Nature calls to mind 

 that the year 1898 was the "jubilee" of the 

 sea serpent, the first mention of a sight of 

 the monster — whether fabulous or not is 

 still undecided — having been made by the 

 captain and officers of the British ship Da3- 

 dalus in 1848. They said they saw it be- 

 tween the Cape of Good Hope and St. Hele- 

 na, and that it was about six hundred feet 

 long. Since then views of sea serpents have 

 been reported nearly every year, but none 

 has ever been caught or seen so near or for 

 so long a time as to be positively identified. 

 There are several creatures of the deep which, 

 seen for an instant, might be mistaken with 

 the aid of an excited imagination for a ma- 

 rine serpent ; and it is not wholly impossible 

 that some descendants of the gigantic sau- 

 rians of old may still be living in the ocean 

 undetected by science. 



The results of a study of the winter food 

 of the chickadee by Clarence M. Weed, of 

 the New Hampshire College Agricultural Ex- 

 periment Station, shows that more than half 

 of it consists of insects, a very large propor- 

 tion of which are taken in the form of eggs. 

 Vegetation of various sorts made up a little 

 less than a quarter of the food ; but two 

 thirds of this consisted of buds and bud 

 scales that were accidentally introduced 

 along with plant-lice eggs. These eggs 

 made up more than one fifth of the entire 

 food, and formed the most remarkable ele- 

 ment of the bill of fare. The destruction 

 of these eggs of plant lice is probably the 

 most important service which the chickadee 

 renders during its winter residence. Insect 

 eggs of many other kinds were found in the 

 food, among them those of the tent caterpil- 

 lar and the fall cankerworm, and the larvm 

 of several kinds of moths, including those of 

 the common apple worm. 



The Merchants' Association of San Fran- 

 cisco has been trying the experiment of 

 sprinkling a street with sea water, and finds 

 that such water binds the dirt together be- 

 tween the paving stones, so that when it is 

 dry no loose dust is formed to be raised by 

 the wind ; that sea water does not dry so 

 quickly as fresh water, so that it has been 

 claimed when salt water has been used that 

 one load of it is equal to three loads of fresh 

 water. The salt water which is deposited on 

 the street absorbs moisture from the air dur- 

 ing the night, whereby the street is thor- 



