HA RD WICKE'S S C1ENCE- G OS SI P. 



169 



same way to keep all warm and dry within. The 

 manner in which she worked was most interesting. 

 Taking the edge of the shell in course of construction, 

 in her mouth, she quickly ran round it, adding to it, 

 forming its shape at the same time. She worked day 

 and night with astonishing rapidity, the whole nest 

 being finished in three or four days. She next laid 

 an egg in each of the five cells, and until they were 

 hatched, most of her time was spent inside her nest, 

 curled round the stem at the top of the cells, against 

 its roof, as if to keep the eggs warm. When first 

 hatched, she did not pay much attention to her 

 family, although if, as she constantly did, she got 

 inside our rooms, she was terribly anxious to get back 

 to them, and fearing to kill her we allowed all wasps 

 to go uninjured. As her family increased in size, her 

 time was fully occupied, and on looking up into the 

 nest, I could see she constantly enlarged the cells, to 

 cover the fast growing bodies of the larva, as they 

 hung suspended by their tails inside and wriggled 

 about when she fed them or tenderly stroked them 

 with her antenna?. When outside she was busy fly- 

 catching stealthily hovering near flowers, and then 

 suddenly darting forward and seizing some unlucky 

 fly, she settled on some leaf close by and proceeded 

 to tear off its wings and legs and to maDgle its body, 

 before flying with it to her nest. When full grown, 

 each larva spins a little web over the mouth of its 

 cell, and soon after emerges a full-grown wasp, ready 

 to assist the queen mother to enlarge the nest, so 

 that she can lay more eggs and can attend to the 

 younger brothers and sisters. 



L'Aigle. 



THE BLOOD OF COBRA. 



I SEND a drawing of some blood corpuscles from 

 a cobra which was exhibited at Titagur, near 

 Calcutta, to enable a friend of mine to photograph a 

 group of irritated snakes. The poison fangs had very 

 recently been extracted from one of the specimens 

 exhibited, and the wounds thus caused were still 

 fresh. The snake-charmer drew some poison from 

 the glands through the sockets of the extracted fangs, 

 and this poison was brought to me. I examined it 

 about thirty hours after it had been drawn from the 

 gland, and by that time it had hardened into what 

 looked like drops of dried gum-water. Dissolving 

 this in a very little distilled water, I put single drops 

 of the solution thus obtained on thin glass covers, 

 dried it, stained it in fuchsin, and mounted it in 

 balsam. On examination, I found numerous masses 

 of what I consider micrococci, which, in my opinion, 

 were probably generated in the poison after its 

 extraction and before it dried. In addition to these 

 were scores of blood corpuscles, from the freshly 

 injured socket of the fang. These have taken the 



stain excellently, and as some of them seem to 

 throw light on the structure of the nucleated disc, 

 I have kept a record of them, aa are normal discs ; 

 b is a corpuscle which has been broken across the 

 middle, along its shortest axis. The nucleus appears 

 to be a solid body. The upper segment of the dire 

 containing the cavity occupied by it before fracture, 

 whilst the nucleus itself protrudes with an unbroken 

 edge beyond the lower segment of the disc, c is a 

 disc in which the circumnuclear has been folded down 

 on one side, and this too is instructive ; d is a corpuscle 



c?M 



X-3-00 



Fig. 170. — Blood Corpuscles of Cobra. 



larger than the rest in which the fuchsin indicates a 

 ragged nucleus, more probably a nucleus connected 

 with the surface of the disc by protoplasmic exten 

 sions. Its size is noteworthy. I have given full details 

 because the blood mounted by me in this case was 

 mixed with cobra poison, and subject for thirty hours 

 to its action, without the contour of the discs being 

 in any way affected. Of course it was the snake's own 

 blood. It only remains to add, that the objective I 

 used was a Zeiss's D on one of Baker's Histological 

 stands, and with a B eye-piece. My drawing was 

 made with a Beale's neutral tinted glass. 



W. J. Simmons. 

 Calcutta. 



GOSSIP ON CURRENT TOPICS. 

 By W. Mattieu Williams, F.R.A.S., F.C.S. 



REINDEER HAIR.— A paragraph that has 

 been "going the round" states that Herr 

 W. C. Moller, a Norwegian engineer, has made 

 important discoveries as to the buoyancy of reindeer 

 hair. He finds that a skin rolled up with the hair 

 inwards and weighing less than 4 lbs. will support 

 for ten days the same weight as an ordinary 

 cork life-belt. Used as a life-belt it has the ad- 

 vantage of keeping the wearer warm. He has con- 

 structed collapsing boats and sledges from reindeer 

 skin, and life-belts filled with reindeer hair equal to 

 those of cork. He finds that a suit made from 

 reindeer hair, weighing little more than 1 lb. (J a 

 kilo.), will save a man from drowning even if it has 

 been in the water for some time. It can be made of 

 any thickness and is warmer than other materials. 

 He is confident that suits made from reindeer hair 

 will in time supersede those made from oilskin. 



