ZOOLOGY. 363 



near the little town of Virtue!, department of Gracias, State of Honduras, 

 on the western or Pacific slope of the Cordilleras. It has long been 

 known, not only in its immediate vicinity, but in connection with various 

 superstitious hypotheses, throughout all Central America. Mention is 

 macle of it in publications dating more than a hundred years. The 

 following extracts from the " Gaceta de Honduras" of the 20th of 

 February, 1853, will serve to give the essential facts concerning it, so far 

 as they are known : 



" Fuente de Saugre. A little to the south of the town of Virtud is a 

 small cavern, which is visited during the day by buzzards and gabalines, 

 and at night by a large number of bats, (vampires,) for the purpose of 

 feeding on a kind of liquid which exudes from the rocks, and which has 

 the color, smell, and taste of blood. A rivulet flows near this grot, which 

 is constantly reddened by a small flow of the liquid. A person approach- 

 ing the grot observes a disagreeable odor ; and when it is reached he sees 

 several pools of blood, in a state of coagulation. Dogs eat it eagerly. 

 The late Don Rafael Osejo undertook to send some bottles of this liquid 

 to London for analysis ; but it corrupted within twenty-four hours, burst- 

 ing the bottles." 



At my request, a gentleman of an observing turn, living not many 

 leagues from. Yirtud, sent me two bottles of this liquid, largely diluted 

 with water, to avoid the catastrophe which happened M. Osejo, and to all 

 others who had attempted to carry any portion of the supposed blood out 

 of the country. One of these bottles, as I have already said, I send you 

 for examination. Sillimans Journal, November, 185-i. 



EXPERIMENTS ON THE SPINAL MARROW. 



At a recent meeting of the French Academy, Dr. Schiff read a paper 

 and performed some interesting experiments on the transmission of sensi- 

 tive impressions in the spinal marrow. In men and the superior orders of 

 animals, the brain sends into the interior of the vertebral column a nervous 

 prolongation, vulgarly called the spinal marrow an organ whose impor- 

 tance is evidently exhibited by the careful armor of bones which protects 

 it, and by the grave disorders superinduced by every injury received, mili- 

 tating against the integrity of its functions. Anatomy divides the spinal 

 marrow into several distinct parts a double and a symmetrical organ, 

 whose right and left moieties are separated by a limit traced by Nature, a 

 sort of furrow, (there are two, one anterior, and the other posterior,) which 

 the anatomical student has but to follow with his scalpel to divide the spi- 

 nal marrow into two equal parts. Each of these parts is divided into 

 three cords, so that there are in all six medullar ribbons two anterior, 

 two posterior, and two lateral. Nor are these all : when the marrow is 

 transversely cut, the student may observe that the right and left moieties are 

 held together by a connecting substance, which is called the central gray 

 , from its being less white than the rest. Here anatomy ends, 



