POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



6 37 



and a disgrace to the age. The poor birds 

 are attacked at their breeding-grounds, and 

 hundreds are slain in a few hours by single 

 parties, whose only use of them is to secure 

 the beautiful plumes with which Nature has 

 unfortunately adorned them. In this way 

 colony after colony is broken up, the great- 

 er part of the birds being actually killed 

 on the spot, often leaving nestlings to suffer 

 a lingering death by starvation. The few 

 old birds that survive usually abandon the 

 locality where for generations their progeni- 

 tors had lived and reared their young undis- 

 turbed, only to be attacked at some new 

 point the following year. The habit most 

 of the species of herons have of breeding 

 together in communities renders their de- 

 struction during nesting-time an easy mat- 

 ter, their strong parental affection leading 

 them to be neglectful of their own safety 

 when their young are in danger. Disgrace- 

 ful and inhuman as the act may seem, many 

 a heronry of the qua-bird, or night-heron, 

 is annually destroyed in mere wantonness, 

 in order that the perpetrator may boast of 

 the ' cart-load' of birds he shot in a single 

 day ! " 



The Plasticity of Ice. Experiments 

 made in 1871 by Prof. Bianconi, of Bo- 

 logna, showed that slow changes of form 

 in ice may be produced without any crush- 

 ing or regelation, and that ice is, to a cer- 

 tain extent, plastic. He has lately pub- 

 lished the results of further experiments on 

 this subject, a brief notice of which is giv- 

 en in Nature as follows : " Granite pebbles 

 and iron plates are slowly pressed into ice 

 at the same temperatures, and not only do 

 they penetrate into it as they would pene- 

 trate into a fluid or semi-fluid, but also the 

 particles of ice are laterally repulsed from 

 beneath the intruding body, and form around 

 it a rising fringe. Moreover, when a flat 

 piece of iron is pressed into the ice, the 

 fringe rising around it expands laterally 

 upon the borders of the piece, and tends 

 thus, as in fluids, to fill up the cavity made 

 by the body driven in. These experiments 

 tend greatly to illustrate the plasticity of 

 ice, but it would be very desirable that some 

 measurements should be given, so as to ob- 

 tain numerical values of the plasticity of 

 ice under various circumstances." 



Perils of Arctic Exploration. Lieutenant 

 Payer, one of the commanders of the Aus- 

 trian Polar Expedition of 1872-74, in his 

 published narrative gives a graphic account 

 of the perilous situation in which the expe- 

 dition found itself on Sunday, October 13, 

 1872. "In the morning of that day," he 

 writes, " as we sat at breakfast, our floe 

 burst across immediately under the ship. 

 Rushing on deck, we discovered that we 

 were surrounded and squeezed by the ice ; 

 the after-part of the ship was already nipped 

 and pressed, and the rudder, which was the 

 first to encounter its assault, shook and 

 groaned ; but, as its great weight did not 

 admit of its being shipped, we were content 

 to lash it firmly. We next sprang on the 

 ice, the tossing, tremulous motion of which 

 literally filled the air with noises as of 

 shrieks and howls, and we quietly got on 

 board all the materials which were lying on 

 the floe, and bound the fissures of the ice 

 hastily together by ice-anchors and cables, 

 filling them up with snow, in the hope that 

 frost would complete our work, though we 

 felt that a single heave might shatter our 

 labors. . . . Mountains threateningly reared 

 themselves from out the level fields of ice, 

 and the low groan which issued from its 

 depths grew into a deep, rumbling sound, 

 and at last rose into a furious howl as of 

 myriads of voices. Noise and confusion 

 reigned supreme, and step by step destruc- 

 tion drew nigh in the crashing together of 

 the fields of ice. Our floe was now crushed, 

 and its blocks, piled up into mountains, 

 drove hither and thither. Here they tow- 

 ered fathoms high above the ship ; there 

 masses of ice fell down as into an abyss 

 under the ship, to be ingulfed in the rush- 

 ing waters, so that the quantity of ice be- 

 neath the ship was continually increased, 

 and at last it began to raise her quite above 

 the level of the sea." 



The Coal and Iron Resources of Ala- 

 bama. The coal and iron resources of Ala- 

 bama were the subject of a recent interest- 

 ing communication by Mr. William Gesner 

 to the Academy of Natural Sciences of 

 Philadelphia. According to the author, the 

 coal-measures of the Warrior and Cahawba 

 coal-fields consist severally of 172 and 173 

 strata. The coal-seams, which range from 



