POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



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branch gallery was broken and drawn sev- 

 eral yards into the main gallery, but the 

 outer one remained intact. The incidental 

 effects of the last two shots also indicated 

 how tremendous a force had been let loose 

 when coal-dust formed one of the elements 

 of the explosion. These experiments were 

 typical of two hundred similar ones that 

 had been made with from one to seven guns, 

 all marked by results sustaining the coal- 

 dust theory. 



Medical Virtues of Dog's Tongnes. 



M. Reimach having called attention to the 

 mention, in the recently discovered inscrip- 

 tions at the Temple of Esculapius, in Epi- 

 daurus, of children having been cured of 

 blindness at that sanctuary by having their 

 eyes licked by the sacred dogs, M. Henri 

 Gai'doz states that he has discovered the 

 faith and practices of the dog-cure among 

 several peoples and in a number of relig- 

 ions. The Hindoos believe that the Eng- 

 lish kill dogs to obtain possession of a 

 sovereign remedy which is found in their 

 tongues. In a. Venetian legend, St. Roch 

 was cured by a balsam distilled from the 

 tongue of his dog. Dogs' tongues are con- 

 sidered to have medical virtue by many peo- 

 ple in Portugal, France, and Scotland. In 

 Bohemia they let dogs lick the faces of 

 new-born children for " good luck." A be- 

 lief in the existence of divinities issuing 

 from dogs, whose office it was to lick the 

 bruises of the wounded, once prevailed in 

 Armenia. In a scene in one of Aristopha- 

 nes's plays, Plutus recovers his sight in 

 the Temple of Esculapius after being licked 

 by two serpents which the god sent for that 

 purpose in answer to his prayer. 



Observations in the Sahara. Dr. Oscar 

 Lenz, whose account of his journey through 

 Morocco, the Sahara, and the Soudan, to 

 Timbuctoo, has been recently published, 

 is the fourth European traveler who has 

 reached the famous " Queen of the Wil- 

 derness," as the desert metropolis is called, 

 during" the present century. Having en- 

 tered the city from the north, and then 

 going from it westward and down the Sene- 

 gal to the Atlantic coast at St. Louis, he has 

 demonstrated the accessibility of Timbuctoo 

 from both directions. One of the results of 



the surveys he made on his journey will 

 probably be the death of the theory that the 

 region of the Sahara has ever been a ma- 

 rine basin, at least since the early Tertiary 

 epoch. The whole of the western section 

 of the desert traversed by him was proved 

 not to be a depression, as has been assumed, 

 but an irregular plateau ; standing in the 

 north at a mean elevation of from eight 

 hundred to one thousand feet, and even at 

 Tandeni, its lowest level, still maintaining 

 an altitude of four or five hundred feet 

 above the Atlantic. The surface forma- 

 tions have nothing in common with ma- 

 rine sedimentary deposits, but are all evi- 

 dently the results of weathering. The nu- 

 merous dried-up water-courses, whose deep 

 channels are distinctly the effect of erosion, 

 also show that this part of the desert has 

 been dry land for many ages. These wadies 

 radiate from the central highland north and 

 northeast to the Mediterranean, east to the 

 Nile, south to Lake Chad and the Niger, 

 and west to the Atlantic, and have been in 

 their day full of water. Hence, it appears 

 that, down to comparatively recent times, the 

 Sahara was a well watered and wooded retrion, 

 thickly inhabited by agricultural and pas- 

 toral communities. What has caused this 

 change in climate ? Dr. Lenz attributes it, 

 not as Peschel has supposed, to the dry 

 northeast polar winds (for these in the Sa- 

 hara yield to the northern and northwest- 

 ern atmospheric currents), but largely to the 

 reckless destruction of the woodlands which 

 once covered extensive tracts in the region. 



Value of Fruit as Food. The " Lancet" 

 regards the increased use of fruit in ordina- 

 ry diet as one of the most salutary tenden- 

 cies of domestic management in our day. 

 The starchy and saccharine components of 

 fruit, while they are not equal in accumu- 

 lated force to the more solid ingredients of 

 meat and fat, are similarly useful in their 

 own degree, and have the advantage of 

 greater digestibility. Other advantages are 

 the locally stimulant action of many sub- 

 acid fruits, its control of a too active peptic 

 secretion, and its influence of attraction 

 upon the alkaline and aperient intestinal 

 juice, to which further effects that aid the 

 maintenance of a pure and vigorous circula- 

 tion are indirectly due. " Thus it follows, 



