24-9 



PART IV. 



MISCELLANEOUS INTELLIGENCE. 



Art. I. Natural History in Foreign Countries. 



FRANCE. 



Collection of Natural History from Pondicherry. — Messrs. Cuvier,Des- 

 fontaines, and Dumeril read a report, at a recent sitting of the Academy of 

 Sciences, on the collections of natural history made by the officers of the 

 Chevrette, daring her voyage to Pondicherry. The specimens brought 

 home include 16 species of the mammalia, 256 of birds, 31 of reptiles, 238 

 of fishes, 271 of mollusca, 16 of the annelides, 132 of Crustacea, 590 of in- 

 sects and spiders, and 161 of zoophytes. Many of these are altogether new 

 to science ; and we are indebted for them solely to the enlightened zeal of 

 the officers, as it formed no part of their duty to attend to natural history. 

 {Le Globe.) 



rngcnuity of a Beaver at Paris. — A beaver from the Rhine is now, or 

 was latel}^ in the royal collection in the Jardin des Plantes at Paris, which 

 exhibited as much ingenuity as has ever been ascribed to the species in a 

 wild state, and more than enough to silence the incredulity of sceptics 

 respecting the beavers' dams, and their magazines of winter provisions. 

 This beaver, for instance, we are informed by M. GeofFroi St. Hilaire, was, 

 during the severe weather in winter, furnished with fresh twigs of trees, to 

 give exercise to his propensity to gnawing, and with apples, &c., as a more 

 nutritive food. One night there came on a snow storm, and the snow beat 

 into his domicile in considerable quantity, till he found out a plan of shield- 

 ing himself from the inconvenience. For this purpose, he cut his supply of 

 twigs into proper lengths, to be wove in the basket fashion, between the 

 bars of his cage; chopped his apples in pieces, to fill up the intervals 

 between the twigs ; and, when even this did not appear sufficiently air- 

 tight, or (if you will) storm-tight, he kneaded the snow into the intervals. 

 By the morning it appeared that he had laboured hard all night, and had 

 completed a very neat and ingenious barricado against the intrusion of the 

 snow. {Athencsum, Nov. 19.) 



The Cuckoo. — The Continental naturalists have raised a controversy 

 respecting the species of the common cuckoo, which is found to vary con- 

 siderably in the colour of its plumage, one being thence called the red and 

 another the grey cuckoo ; the former supposed to be the Cuculiis hepaticus 

 of Latham, and the latter the C. canorus of Linnaeus. M. Payrandeau, 

 however, states distinctly, on the authority of a series of specimens, as well 

 as of repeated dissection, that both the male and female young of the Cii- 

 culus canorus, before the first moult, have the same colour : that, after the 

 first moult, the males have a deep olive ash colour, and the red spots have 

 already begun to disappear; in the females, on the contrary, the red spots 

 become brighter and larger : that, at the third moult, the red spots on the 

 male disappear altogether, while in the female they continue to the most 

 Vol. IL — No. 8. s 



