POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



253 



the least. But recent experiments made by 

 Prof. Kiihne, of Heidelberg, appear to show 

 that the image does remain. He took a 

 rabbit and fixed its head and one of its eye- 

 balls at a distance of about five feet from a 

 small opening in a window-shutter. The 

 head was covered for five minutes with a 

 black cloth and then exposed for three min- 

 utes to a somewhat clouded mid-day sky. 

 The rabbit was then instantly decapitated ; 

 the eyeball which had been exposed was 

 extirpated in yellow light, then opened 

 and instantly plunged into a weak solution 

 of alum. Two minutes after death the sec- 

 ond eyeball, without removal from the head, 

 was subjected to exactly the same processes. 

 On the following morning the retinae of both 

 eyes were carefully isolated, separated from 

 the optic nerve, and turned. They exhib- 

 ited a nearly square, sharp image, with 

 sharply-defined edges. 



Extirpation of onr Larger Mammals. 



In a paper on the extirpation of our larger 

 indigenous mammals, published in the Penn 

 Monihhi^ Mr. J. A. Allen remarks that the 

 larger, the less sagacious, or the otherwise 

 more easily-captured species, have always 

 been the first to be destroyed. The walrus, 

 being hunted for its ivory and its oil, soon be- 

 came extinct in the Gulf of St. Lawrence ; 

 the bison wholly disappeared east of the Mis- 

 sissippi (south of Wisconsin) prior to the 

 year 1800 ; the moose and the caribou were 

 early pressed back into the remoter north- 

 ern forests ; and the elk everywhere quickly 

 disappeared before the advancing settle- 

 ments. Formerly abundant from the Great 

 Lakes nearly to the Gulf coast, its sole sur- 

 vivors east of the Mississippi for the last 

 few decades have been confined to the least 

 frequented parts of the Alleghanies, where 

 few, if any, still survive. Thirty years ago 

 it was abundant over nearly all of the prai- 

 ries, plains, and mountain valleys of the 

 Great West, where it is now confined within 

 comparatively narrow boundaries, and its 

 present rapid rate of decrease portends its 

 speedy total extirpation south of the forty- 

 ninth parallel. The Virginia deer, once a 

 common denizen of the whole eastern half 

 of the United States, now scarcely exists in 

 New England south of the forests of Maine 

 and Northern New Hampshire, or in New 



York south or west of the great Adiron- 

 dack Wilderness, or anywhere in the Middle 

 States away from the mountains. It has 

 also disappeared from a large part of the 

 Atlantic coast-region farther southward, 

 and from the greater part of the area be- 

 tween the Great Lakes and the Tennessee 

 river. The bear, the panther, the gray wolf, 

 and the lynx, have become similarly re- 

 stricted. The fisher, the marten, and the 

 Canada porcupine, former inhabitants of 

 the northern parts of the northern tier of 

 States, as well as of the Appalachian high- 

 lands to or beyond Virginia, have only here 

 and there a few lingering representatives 

 in the least frequented parts of the moun- 

 tains, and are much more rare than formerly 

 in the forests of Northern New England and 

 the great unsettled region north of the St. 

 Lawrence. The same is true of the beaver, 

 except that it had a much more extended 

 range to the southward, being a former in- 

 habitant of Northern Florida and the mid- 

 dle and northern portions of the Gulf States, 

 and of all the intervening region thence 

 northward. 



Psytliic Flionomcna. Mr. Sergeant Cox, 

 in a letter to the London Spectator, made 

 the assertion that no one who had inves- 

 tigated " psychic phenomena " ever had 

 "come to any other conclusion than that 

 they were real." To this Moncure D. Con- 

 way replies as follows : 



" I beg to inform that gentleman that I 

 have for more than twenty years, both in the 

 United States and in England, and in the pres- 

 ence of well-known mediums as well as pri- 

 vate circles, diligently investigated the sub- 

 ject, and I have never seen any phenomena at 

 all worthy of notice, except such as indicate 

 the audacity of some persons and the weak- 

 ness of others." 



Extending the Meat-Supply. One of the 



most enthusiastic hippophagists of Paris, 

 M. Decroix, not content with advocating 

 the use of horse-flesh for food, now would 

 have people eat the flesh of diseased ani- 

 mals. He has made it a practice to cat 

 the flesh of horses killed in his service, 

 which had glanders or farcy, and, wheth- 

 er thoroughly or partially cooked, he found 

 no evil results to his health. Further, 



