POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



57i 



it ferment. After a time it is dug up and 

 eaten ; but the smell is rather strong at 

 first. Fiji is a commonwealth in the proper 

 sense of the term, all articles being public 

 property. No native lives by trade, and 

 they seem to have no idea of the principles 

 of commerce. They are industrious, and 

 adepts in pottery and wood-work, although 

 their implements are for the most part 

 crude. The native drum, formerly used to 

 sound the war alarm, is now employed to 

 summon people to church, which they all 

 attend. 



Ocean Transportation of Plant Species. 



Experiments performed by Dr. Guppy at 

 the Keeling Islands, which are six or seven 

 hundred miles from the nearest large land, 

 show that certain kinds of seeds will germi- 

 nate freely after being thirty, forty, or fifty 

 days in sea-water. During this time they 

 may be conveyed, on a drift current of only 

 one knot an hour, a distance of from one 

 thousand to twelve hundred miles. Some 

 seeds that do not readily float, or float only 

 for short periods, are conveyed hither and 

 thither in a variety of ways as in the cavi- 

 ties of pumice-stone, and in the crevices of 

 drift-wood. Such seeds as germinate have 

 difficulties in establishing themselves, the 

 most formidable of which are caused by the 

 crabs, which eat the green sprouts as soon 

 as they appear. If the plants escape the 

 crabs in their earliest infancy, they are safe. 

 An evidence of the tenacity of life under 

 unfavorable conditions is afforded by the 

 fact that despite clearing and cultivation, 

 and the introduction of foreign enemies, no 

 species of plant ever known to grow wild on 

 the little islands has become quite extinct. 



The Wise Use of Medals. More dis- 

 crimination in awarding medals by learned 

 societies is recommended by Prof. W. M. 

 Williams. " Looking critically," he says, 

 " at the awards that have been made during 

 the present generation, it is difficult to find 

 a case in which the honor has not been fairly 

 earned ; but still, I think, they have not been 

 as beneficially awarded as they might have 

 been, nor in the manner generally desired 

 by their founders. Most of them were in- 

 tended as a stimulant, encouragement, and 

 help to scientific workers. Such a medal 



would be all these to a poor or young or 

 obscure worker, but is none of them to a 

 man whose reputation is established, whose 

 scientific eminence is already attained, and 

 who is already quite sufficiently official." 

 A case in point is that of J. A. R. Newlands, 

 whose duly published discovery in 1864 and 

 1865 of the periodic law of the chemical 

 elements was not noticed, while the Royal 

 Society's Davy medal for the same discov- 

 ery was given four or five years afterward 

 to the "official" chemists Mendeleef and 

 Lothar Meyer. But at length, in November 

 last, Newlands received the medal which he 

 had earned previous to either of the other 

 chemists. 



Leonardo da Vinci's Theory of Fossils. 



M. Charles Revaisson is publishing photo- 

 typic facsimiles of the manuscripts of Leo- 

 nardo da Vinci. It seems that nothing which 

 constituted the scientific domain of mankind 

 in the sixteenth century was strange to that 

 illustrious artist. We give here his theory 

 of the formation of fossils : " Of animals 

 which have bones on the outside, such 

 as shell-fish, snails, and oysters, of innu- 

 merable species. When the floods of turbid 

 rivers discharge fine mud on the animals 

 living in the adjoining waters of the sea- 

 shore, the animals remain pressed in the 

 mud, and, being overwhelmed by its weight, 

 necessarily die for want of the creatures on 

 which they are accustomed to feed. The 

 sea receding in time, this mud, the salt 

 water having run off from it, becomes 

 changed into stone, and the shells are filled 

 with sand instead of the animals that have de- 

 cayed from within them. Thus, in the midst 

 of the transformation of all the surrounding 

 mud into stone, that also which remained 

 within the shells becomes joined by means 

 of a slight opening of the shells with the 

 other mud ; so that all the shells are inclosed 

 within the stone that is, the stone that in- 

 cludes them and that which they contain. 

 These shells are found in many places ; and 

 nearly all the petrified mollusks in the rocks 

 of the mountains still have their natural 

 shells particularly those which had grown 

 old enough to be preserved by their hard- 

 ness ; and the young, being already for the 

 most part reduced to lime, had been pene- 

 trated by the viscous and petrifiable humor. 



