76 



HARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



[April 1, 1870. 



amongst "the upper ten," some people attribute 

 the origin of the popular name Lords-and-Ladies. 

 We stick to the ninepin theory. 



Pereira in the edition of his " Materia Medica," 

 published in 1855, states, on the authority of Mr. 

 Groves, that " scarcely any Portland arrow-root is 

 now manufactured ; the yield, according to his 

 informant (an old woman and the only arrow-root 

 manufacturer now on the island), is three pounds 

 from a peck of roots." It is further stated that 

 " the fresh plant is an acrid poison, causing burning 

 and swelling of the throat, vomitiDg, colic, 

 diarrhoea, and convulsions ; medicinally the tubers 

 were formerly used as diuretics in dropsies, and as 

 expcetorants in chronic catarrhs." 



Varieties of the Aracecc are cultivated for food in 

 many parts of the world; in Bengal the Arum 

 campanulatum, called " 01 " by the natives, is so 

 largely used and so valuable as to " deserve to be 

 called the Telinga potato" ; in the South Sea Islands 

 whole fields of Colocasia macrorhiza (the " Kopeh," 

 or "Tara" of the natives) are to be seen. The 

 cooked corms form a staple article of food, 

 in a raw state they are desperately poisonous. 

 We well remember one day (lang syne) a dear and 

 trusty friend of ours being very much delighted 

 by discovering a representative of his old familiar 

 Tara-root, of the charming and fertile island of 

 Tahiti of pleasant memory, growing amongst the 

 granite rocks that frown behind the village of Shek- 

 pei-wan, in that arid, sterile abomination of deso- 

 lation the island of Hong-Kong, and having 

 incautiously, in describing the way in which it was 

 eaten by the people in the Pacific, touched the 

 bruised root with his tongue, the latter became so 

 terribly swollen, and the upper part of the throat so 

 completely paralyzed, that we were alarmed for his 

 life, and he remained unwell for days after the 

 shock. 



We beg to submit another of this tribe, the West 

 Indian Dumb-cane {Bieffenhachia seguind), for the 

 consideration of hen-pecked husbands afflicted with 

 curtain lectures, &c. " The Dumb-cane, when ap- 

 plied to the tongue, possesses .the remarkable pro- 

 perty of destroying the power of speech." 



The Arum maculatum is perhaps the most remark- 

 able among plants for the amount of heat evolved 

 by it at flowering time. During the expansion of 

 the spathe Senebier found that its temperature 

 rose to 15° P. above that of the atmosphere ; while 

 Dutrochet measured it from 25° to 27°. Hubert 

 states that in the Isle of Prance, in experiments 

 made upon an Arad {Colocasia odora), a thermo- 

 meter placed in the centre of five spadices stood at 

 131° P., and in the centre of twelve at 142i°, while 

 the temperature of the air was only 75° F. 



Although the flowers appear so early in the spring 

 the fruit does not ripen till late in autumn. The hood 

 lias then shrunk up to a mere remnant, the leaves 



have dwindled away almost to nothing, the stamens- 

 and frills and Dejanira's club have withered and 

 fallen, and only the fertile pistils turned into fruit 



Fig. 74. Ripe fruit of Arum maculatum, rat. size. 



remain ; they are then of a bright orange, or some- 

 times of a flaming red colour, conspicuous amongst 

 the less brilliant tints of the hedge-growth : so little 

 resemblance does the plant bear at that season to 

 the hooded beauty of April and May, that children 

 often ask what are those bright berries growing on 

 the bank, and are amazed to find that they are the 

 seed, or more strictly speaking the fruit, of their 

 springtide friends, the Lords-and-Ladies. 

 Bury Cross, Gosport. 



THE COLOUR OP INSECTS APFECTED BY 

 HIBERNATION. 



TN SECTS, as is well known, may be made to 

 -*- hibernate, whether they like it or not. The 

 experiments of Reaumur and others have taught us 

 that the exit of the complete insect may be retarded 

 almost indefinitely by keeping the chrysalis in ice, or, 

 in other words, by reducing it to a state of involun- 

 tary and altogether abnormal torpidity. Duponchel, 

 however, has shown, that during the condition of 

 hibernation, structural changes of great importance 

 take place. His experiments — repeated, as he assures 

 us, and confirmed by Boisduval — had for their 

 object, in the first instance, to ascertain whether two 

 butterflies, Vanessa prorsa and V. levana— unknown ■ 

 in England, but not uncommon on the Continent — 

 should be combined under a single species. The 

 interesting circumstances are best related in M. 

 DuponchePs own words {Diet. Univ. de VHist. 

 Naturelle) :— 



"It was for a longtime believed that these two 

 butterflies form two distinct species, mainly on ac- 

 count of the extraordinary difference in colour ; the 



