718 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



culiar vocabularr, a variety of singular terms 

 coniprising inarticulate sounds and musical 

 calls, whistling, chirping, clicking, and other 

 sounds not easily represented by any com- 

 bination of letters of the English alphabet, 

 or by musical notation. Prof. Bolton has 

 collected these words from a considerably 

 large number of languages, ancient and mod- 

 ern, describes them, and analyzes them so 

 far as they are susceptible of analysis. He 

 reaches the general conclusion that the terms 

 are mostly corruptions of the ancient names of 

 the animals, sometimes with a prefix signify- 

 ing " come," with expressions that have be- 

 come otherwise obsolete. They are all sub- 

 ject to the same influences that lead to the 

 development of dialects, and, the language 

 being unwritten, the changes are quite radi- 

 cal. An important feature mentioned, but 

 not dwelt upon at length, is the musical in- 

 tonation giving a special character often as- 

 sociated with the call. We are surprised 

 that while the author says much about 

 "puss" as a call for the cat, he does not 

 even mention " kitty," which is used a hun- 

 dred times as often. 



Plants and their Insect Inhabitants. 



Plants have a special interest to the ento- 

 mologist according to the number of insect 

 species they harbor, and the invasion which 



causes dismay to the gardener biings him 

 joy qualified, we are glad to say, if the 

 plant is a valuable one, by sorrow for his 

 neighbor's trouble. Miss Mary E. Murte- 

 feldt, of Kirkwood, Mo., has found no better 

 way of making the acquaintance of the in- 

 sect fauna of a locality than to take up, one 

 after another, its native or introduced plants 

 and, keeping them under close observation 

 from spring till fall, and perhaps for several 

 successive years, note the species that visit 

 them and the larvae that subsist upon them, 

 either exclusively or in common with other 

 plants. Many weeds afford abundant har- 

 vests of this kind ; one of the most produc- 

 tive of them is the cut-leaved ragweed {Am- 

 brosia artemisicefolia) of roadsides and fallow 

 fields, every part of which foliage, tiower, 

 leafstalk, stem, and root sustains its own 

 peculiar species, the majority of which do 

 not occur on other plants. This plant is 

 especially a mine of wealth to the micro- 

 lepidopterist in the number, beauty, and 

 variety of the species that are partially or 

 wholly dependent upon it. Miss Murtefeldt 

 names between forty-five and fifty species of 

 five orders which she has found on this one 

 plant. Perhaps one fourth of these are 

 limited to the genus Ambrosia, and six or 

 seven have been found only on artemisice- 

 folia. 



MINOR PARAGRAPHS. 



It is reported that an important advance 

 in color photography has been made by M. 

 Yilledieu Chassagnc and Dr. Adrien Michel 

 Dausac. The process is simple and inex- 

 pensive. A negative is taken on a gelatin 

 plate, which has been treated with a solu- 

 tion of certain salts (the nature of the solu- 

 tion is kept secret). The negative is devel- 

 oped and fixed in the ordinary way. From it 

 a positive is printed on a sensitized paper 

 which has previously been treated with the 

 unknown solution. This positive is then 

 washed over with three colored solutions 

 blue, green, and red and it takes up in suc- 

 cession the colors in their appropriate parts, 

 and the combinations of the colors giving all 

 varieties of tints. 



Berthelot and Vieille have riecently 

 been experimenting with acetylene, in refer- 



ence to its explosiveness. They found that 

 when acetylene at ordinary pressure is ex- 

 posed to the action of the electric spark, a 

 red-hot wire, or a fulminate shock, the gas 

 is decomposed only in the immediate vicin- 

 ity ; when the gas is under pressure, how- 

 ever, the result is quite different, the acet- 

 ylene acting as do the ordinary ex[)losive 

 mixtures when the pressure exceeds two 

 atmospheres the explosion rapidly spread- 

 ing through the entire mass which, decom- 

 poses into hydrogen and finely divided bulky 

 carbon. Liquid acetylene behaves in the 

 same way. Using eighteen grammes in a 

 bomb of 48'96 c. c. capacity, the final pres- 

 sure was 5,564 kilogrammes per square cen- 

 timetres almost the equal of gun cotton. 



Stress is laid by M. Albert Gaudry, in 

 his study of Philosophical Paleontology, on 



