NOTES. 



511 



Are the Salts of Copper poisonous? 



Dr. Burcq, M. Galippe, and others, having 

 in communications addressed to the Paris 

 Academy of Sciences asserted that copper 

 is not poisonous after the manner of lead, 

 and that it may be absorbed for a long 

 time without injurious consequences, Dr. 

 E. Decaisne has submitted to the same 

 Academy the results of observations made 

 by himself, from which it would appear 

 that the reverse is the fact. We present a 

 synopsis of Dr. Decaisne's paper, which we 

 find in La Nature. He states that in 1864 

 he published a memoir entitled " A Medical 

 Study on Absinthe-Drinkers," in which it was 

 shown that a great many of the cheaper 

 qualities of absinthe contain sulphate of 

 copper, and that, of a hundred and fifty ab- 

 sinthe-drinkers observed by him, a certain 

 number gave clear evidence of copper-poi- 

 soning. Fifteen samples of absinthe, pur- 

 chased at wine-shops in Paris, all contained 

 sulphate of copper in varying proportions : 

 three of the samples contained it in the pro- 

 portion of twenty-five centigrammes to the 

 litre. Indeed, some of the distillers frankly 

 admitted that they used sulphate of copper 

 to color the absinthe. M. Decaisne cited a 

 recent case of poisoning by acetate of cop- 

 per, that of a young man of twenty-three, 

 who showed all the symptoms of acute poi- 

 soning by copper salts, after having drunk 

 some " eau de vie de marc," an inferior 

 quality of brandy. Analysis of a sample 

 of this brandy showed it to contain 1.164 

 gramme of acetate of copper to the litre. 

 The hquor had been distilled in an appa- 

 ratus that had lain unused for a year, and 

 which had become filled with acetate of 

 copper. French statistics show that sul- 

 phate and acetate of lead rank third among 

 substances employed in criminal poisoning. 



NOTES. 



Mr. Jabez Hogg, the eminent English 

 microscopist, in a recent paper calls atten- 

 tion to certain " errors of interpretation " to 

 which microscopists are liable in examining 

 the scales of insects and other minute ob- 

 jects. Some such " errors of interpretation " 

 were pointed out by Mr. John Michels in the 

 Monthly two years ago, but his statements 

 were at the time called in question by mi- 

 croscopists in various portions of this coun- 



try. Mr. Hogg himself, when these errors 

 were first pointed out in the London Micro- 

 scopical Society by Dr. Piggott, expressed 

 the opinion that the latter was laboring un- 

 der a mistake. Later, however, he was 

 convinced of the correctness of Piggott's 

 views, and now confirms them with his own 

 observations. 



A PRESSURE of forty to one hundred 

 and twenty atmospheres has been found by 

 Quincke to be incapable of forcing a per- 

 ceptible quantity of carbonic-acid or hydro- 

 gen gas through a glass wall 1.5 millimetre 

 in thickness, during a period of fifteen years. 



A MONUMENT to Licbig was unveiled at 

 Darmstadt, his native town, on May 12th, 

 the seventy-fourth anniversary of his birth. 



Died, in Berlin, on March 29th, Alexan- 

 der Braun, Professor of Botany in the Uni- 

 versity of Berhn, aged seventy-two years. 

 In a brief notice of his life Professor Asa 

 Gray says : " His influence as a teacher is 

 said to have been great ; as an investigator, 

 he stood in the first rank among the bota- 

 nists of our time ; as a man, his simple, ear- 

 nest, and transparently truthful character 

 won the admiration and love of all who 

 knew him." With Braun's memoirs on the 

 " Arrangement of the Scales of Pine-Cones, 

 etc." (1830), began the present knowledge 

 of phyllotaxis. Other noteworthy memoirs 

 by this author are that on "Rejuvenescence 

 in Nature," and "The Vegetable Individual 

 in its Relation to Species," both of which 

 have been translated into English. 



The residual charcoal, after lixiviation 

 of destructively distilled sea-weed, possesses 

 an extraordinary power of absorption and 

 deodorization. According to Mr. E. C. C. 

 Stanford, its composition is about midway 

 between that from wood and that from bone, 

 in the proportion of carbon ; but it is more 

 nearly like the latter, from which it differs 

 in containing more carbon and carbonates 

 of calcium and magnesium, and less phos- 

 phates. It can be obtained at one-fourth the 

 price of any other charcoal. 



Mention is made, in Land and Water, of 

 a singular hybrid, the progeny of a barn- 

 yard cock and a common duck. The body 

 of the hybrid is like that of a duck, but the 

 feet, which have three front claws and a ru- 

 dimentary back one, are not webbed, and 

 the upper mandible is that of a fowl, extend- 

 ing only half the length of the lower, which 

 is that of a duck, the singular formation 

 causing great difficulty in feeding. 



A writer in the American Naturalist 

 cites the following instance of carnivorous 

 habits in the red-headed woodpecker : In 

 the summer of 1876 a man in Humboldt 

 County, Iowa, raised a large number of black 



