POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



859 



sea-level exerted much influence on health, 

 though the great thing for emigrants was to 

 choose a climate as nearly as possible like 

 that to which they were used. 



An Experiment in Hypnotism. Mr. A. 



Taylor Inness contributes to the London 

 Spectator a curious relation of a case in 

 which a hypnotizing practitioner ventured to 

 stop the beating of the heart of his subject. 

 Calling a physician of the place, who was 

 well acquainted with the subject, to himself, 

 he asked him, " Doctor, will you put your 

 finger upon his left pulse, while I keep mine 



on his right ? " Dr. , says the story, 



" was skeptical and hostile, but at our in- 

 stance he consented. Keeping one hand on 

 the lad's wrist, Lewis laid the other gently 

 over his heart. Within a minute or two M. 



lost his rich and vivid color, and Lewis 



counted the decreasing strokes till he an- 

 nounced that they were scarcely recognizable. 

 ' Is that not so, doctor ? ' he asked. Dr. 



was extremely unwilling to speak ; but, 



under the urgency of some of us who stood 

 by, he at last said, in so many words, that 

 the pulse had almost shrunk to nothing. 

 The boy stood, a ghastly statue, for a min- 

 ute longer, when Lewis, saying hurriedly, 

 ' The pulse is now imperceptible ; we must 

 protract this no longer,' took away his hand 

 from the breast, to the evident relief of his 

 improvised colleague. But it was to the 

 evident relief, too, of their common patient. 

 I remember distinctly to this day the ashen 

 hue even of his lips, and the wonderful 

 gradations through which the blood found 

 its way back into them and into the whole 

 young face a face still asleep, but now 

 glowing as if it had traveled a long way from 

 the margin of the grave." 



Physical Geography of the Mediter- 

 ranean. Sir R. L. Playfair said on this sub- 

 ject, in his British Association address, that 

 the Mediterranean must at one time have 

 consisted of two inclosed or inland basins 

 like the Dead Sea, separated by the isthmus 

 between Cape Bon, in Tunisia, and Sicily. 

 The depth between Italy and Sicily is insig- 

 nificant, and Malta is a continuation of Sicily. 

 The shallows cut off the two basins from all 

 but superficial communication. The con- 

 figuration of the bottom shows that the 



whole strait was at one time continuous land, 

 affording free communication for land ani- 

 mals between Africa and Europe. In the 

 caves and fissures of Malta are three species 

 of fossil elephants, a hippopotamus, a gigan- 

 tic dormouse, and other animals that could 

 never have lived on so small an island. In 

 Sicily remains of the existing elephant have 

 been found, as well as the Elephas aniiquus, 

 and two species of hippopotamus, while 

 nearly all these and many other animals of 

 African type have been found in the Pliocene 

 deposits and caverns of the Atlantic region. 

 The submersion of this isthmus no doubt 

 occurred when the waters of the Atlantic 

 were introduced through the Strait of Gi- 

 braltar. The rainfall over the entire area 

 of the Mediterranean is not more than thirty 

 inches, while the evaporation is twice as 

 great. Therefore, were the strait to be 

 closed, the level of the sea would sink again, 

 and this would affect the Adriatic and the 

 ^Egean Seas and a great part of the west- 

 ern basin. At the Strait of Gibraltar an 

 upper current at three miles an hour sup- 

 plies the sea with the difference between 

 rainfall and evaporation. An opposite cur- 

 rent of warmer water flows out at half the 

 rate, carrying off the excess of salinity, but 

 leaving the Mediterranean salter than any 

 part of the ocean except the Red Sea. The 

 almost constant temperature of 56, com- 

 pared with 53 to 49 in the Atlantic, en- 

 abled Dr. Carpenter to distinguish between 

 Atlantic and Mediterranean water. 



Castomary Survivals. Our knowledge 

 of primitive civilization, says Canon Isaac 

 Taylor, in Knowledge, is largely derived from 

 the study of survivals. Survivals may be 

 defined as anomalous traditional usages, 

 seemingly meaningless or useless, which 

 originated in some state of things that has 

 passed away, but which by the force of cus- 

 tom have continued to exist. That the 

 Queen still gives her assent to acts of Parlia- 

 ment in a formula couched in Norman French 

 is, for instance, a survival from the time 

 when the sovereign of England was a Nor- 

 man duke, unable to speak English. A 

 judge's wig is a survival of the long hair 

 which came in fashion at the Restoration ; 

 and the black patch on the crown, with its 

 white fringe, is a survival of the black skull- 



