IS 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



[Jan. 1, 1S6S. 



the other, even when they had fasted for a week. I 

 have therefore put this down as an unfounded 

 statement. I do not think any evidence can be 

 given that bugs eat each other. — Edicin Holmes. 



Baby Pkawns. — In Once a Week " J. K. Lord," 

 in an article on "Prawning on the Sussex Coast," 

 says — " The baby prawn, so it is said, is not much 

 like its parents, and has to undergo several changes 

 prior to its arriving at an adult form. * * * I 

 am, however, disposed to think that the baby 

 prawn, when it quits the egg, is the exact counter- 

 part of its parent in everything except size." 

 "J. K. L." may perhaps like to have this supposi- 

 tion verified as positive fact. The common prawn 

 {Palamon serratus) has often spawned in my tank, 

 but I was never able to watch the final develop- 

 ment, however, as the eggs always disappeared 

 after a certain stage, being devoured as tit bits, I 

 imagine, by other Crustacea and fishes, until one day 

 I found a vessel, in which a fine berried prawn had 

 been living alone, swarming with hundreds of young 

 prawns, say the eighth of an inch long, tiny, delicate, 

 transparent little things, and apparently the exact 

 counterpart of their mother in everything except size. 

 So delicate and fragile were they, that my efforts 

 to rear any were fruitless, though many were taken 

 out and put into other vessels for safety. — G. S. 



Phteisis among Swallows. — One day last 

 August I chanced to walk along an embankment 

 which divides the two reservoirs of the Wakefield 

 Waterworks, a spot where swallows congregate in 

 numbers. There was a large flight of them resting 

 on the ledge, but as I advanced they took wing. 

 On arriving at the spot where they had been most 

 thickly seated, I found one poor little fellow who 

 had just died, as he was still warm and flaccid. I 

 put him in my pocket intending to distend his 

 arterus with size injection, but on trying, next day, 

 I failed from the coarseness of my nozzles ; but that 

 he might not be a useless find, I proceeded to dissect 

 him. I found the pleural surface of the lungs to be 

 studded with minute yellowish grey points which, 

 when cut into and put under the microscope, pre- 

 sented all the characters of tubercle. At one point 

 of the mesentery I found small indurated patches 

 between the layers of the peritoneum which, I have 

 no doubt, were lymphatic glands ; their contents 

 displayed something very like tubercular debris. I 

 am not aware that consumption has before been 

 noticed to occur in swallows, but the a priori 

 reasons that it should do so are strong. Many 

 tropical animal, as monkeys and parrots, suffer from 

 tubercle when confined in this country, and I have 

 seen the lungs of a goldfinch which had died of it, 

 so that it is not unlikely that a few of the thousands 

 of hirundines who arc our summer visitors may 

 fall victims to our dreaded malady. Recent ex- 



periments go to show clearly that phthisis is com- 

 municable to the lower animals by inoculation, and 

 the Italian doctrine, that the disease is commu- 

 nicable from one individual to another by prolonged 

 contact, as in the case of husband and wife, is under 

 serious consideration. — Lawson Tait, Wakefield. 



GEOLOGY. 



Salt. — It is in the New Red Sandstone beds in 

 England that enormous masses of salt are found, 

 though the mineral is not confined to this formation 

 in other countries. This important and abundant 

 substance, so essential to life, is compounded of two 

 things, either of which, if taken separately, would 

 destroy life. In Cheshire there are beds of salt 120 

 feet thick ; but Droitwich, in the middle of Worces- 

 tershire, yields the strongest and purest. In the 

 time of the occupation of Britain by the Romans, 

 salt-mines were worked at Droitwich, which -still 

 yield an inexhaustible supply, many thousand tons 

 being annually obtained from them. A fountain of 

 salt-water continually wells up ; and from one spring 

 alone a weekly produce of one thousand tons has 

 been obtained. — Jackson's " Cabinet of the Earth 

 Unlocked." 



Hugh Miller was a Scotchman, born at 

 Cromarty, in 1802. His father followed the family- 

 calling of a sailor ; and Hugh was still a child when 

 his father was lost in a ship, of which he had risen 

 to be the owner. At the Cromarty parish school, to 

 which he was sent, little Hugh distinguished him- 

 self by his love of reading and his fondness for 

 poetry ; but he received his first taste for science 

 from the instruction which an uncle gave him in 

 natural history. Notwithstanding his literary and 

 scientific aspirations, however, his circumstances 

 obliged him to enter upon the humble occupation 

 of a working mason ; but it was in this employment 

 that, while working blocks of stone in the quarry, 

 he was also working out his future fame ; and in 

 these blocks he was -unconsciously laying the 

 foundation of his celebrity.— Jackson's " Cabinet of 

 the Earth Unlocked." 



Oebitolina globulakis is found in both the 

 upper and lower cretaceous deposits of this 

 neighbourhood, as well as in flint, but is more 

 common in the Upper Chalk. In size it varies from 

 that of a pea to a large nut, and is sometimes 

 partially bored, and occasionally entirely perforated; 

 and as it makes its way from the chalk-flints iuto 

 the drift-gravel, it is thought, being occasionally 

 perforated, to have been used by the early flint- 

 working people of the Drift period to form neck- 

 laces ; and hence it has been named the " fossil 

 beard." In an article on the Poraminifera, in the 

 Annuls of Natural History for I860, the following 



