Zoology, 4: 51 



pelvis, and consequently obstructing the circulation. This effect is far- 

 ther increased by nurses carrying children on their right arm ; and by 

 the care taken to teach children not to use their left hands. {Journal de 

 Physiologic Exp.) 



^ Wolves and Foxes in Scotland. — In my antiquarian reading I have met 

 with the following singular notice of Scottish wolves in BcllendcrCs Trans- 

 lation of Boelius, edit. Edin. 1541 : — " The wolffis are right noisome to 

 tame beastial in all parts of Scotland, except one part thereof named Glen- 

 morris, in which the tame beastial gets little damage of wild beastial, espe- 

 cially of tods [foxes]; for each house nurses a young tod certain days, and 

 mengis [mixes] the flesh thereof after it be slain with such meat [food] as 

 they give to their fowls or other small beasts, and so many as eats of this 

 meat are preserved two months after from any damage of tods; for tods 

 will eat no flesh that gusts of their own kind." — J. Rennic. 



Black Sheep, — According to Giraldus Cambrensis (who, though a re- 

 tailer of fables, may be perhaps credited in this), the Irish in his time 

 w^re chiefly clothed in black garments, because their sheep, from which 

 the wool was furnished, were black. (Vide Topograph.^ and also Col- 

 lectan. de Reb. Hibern., xi.) When this is compared with what Southey 

 tells us, in his Letters from Spain, namely, that in the north of the Penin- 

 sula, the sheep are almost all of a black colour ; we may, perhaps, justly 

 conclude, that the black Irish sheep, mentioned by old Giraldus, had been 

 originally imported from Spain at the period, it may be, of the Milesian 

 emigration. Those who are extensively acquainted with Ireland may be 

 able to say whether this breed of black sheep is now propagated there. — 

 J.R. 



Hands of the Whale. — The breast fins of the whale, instead of being 

 composed of straight spines like those of fishes, conceal bones and muscle 

 formed very like those of the fore legs of land animals; but so enveloped in 

 dense skin, that the fingers have no separate motion, though the hand (if 

 it may be called so) is flat, very pliant, large and strong, enabling the whale 

 to sustain the young closely compressed to its body, as was remarked by 

 Aristotle. The gradation of the hand, as it appears in apes, &c., may be 

 traced in the otter, seal, walrus, raanati, and dugong, into the whale. 

 {Dr. Harwoody Led.) 



^ The King-fisher. — In the little work entitled Ornithologia, by Mr. Jen- 

 nings, I find two statements respecting the common king-fisher (^Icedo 

 Fspida),_which require modification. He says that it is " rarely, if ever, 

 found near the habitations of man." (p. 172.) On the contrary, I am in 

 the habit of seeing king-fishers very often on the banks of a brook, which 

 runs past my garden, not a hundred yards from the house in which I write 

 this paragraph. A nest was found with young, last summer, on the bank 

 of the same brook, and within gun-shot of a whole row of houses. Mr. 

 Jennings farther states that he saw a king-fisher on the Ravensbourne, in 

 September 1827, insinuating thereby that the bird is rare; but the brook 

 just alluded to j's a branch of the Ravensbourne, on which they are far 

 from uncommon. — J. R. 



The King-fisher^ Alcedo Tspida ( fig. 3. Vol. I. p. 25.) — About ten years 

 ago, when living near St. Anstell, a small town in the west of Cornwall, ] 

 was told that a man in the neighbourhood had caught two curious birds, and 

 that no one knew what they were ; I accordingly, with all the eagerness of 

 a boy and a naturalist, went to the man's house, and there saw two little 

 birds sittiiig up like the auk (A lea), rather than standing, on the floor of a 

 small cage. They looked very melancholy, and sfared about them in a very 

 vacant manner. I quickly perceived that they were young king-fishers just 

 able to fly. In reply to my enquiries the man told me that he had put a 

 call bullfinch (Loxia Pyrrhula) in a cage with limed twigs on a hedge 

 near the river. This river is a rocky stream which flows at the bottom of 



Vol. II.— No. 10. hh 



