72 On the Lake of Zirknitz in Carniola. 



that the agents used might have the effect attributed to them, 

 quoted the cases of several individuals who had laboured under 

 indisposition, and who had observed a change of the colour of 

 their hair, under the treatment to which they had been sub- 

 jected ; whilst finally it was cited that the bright feathers of the 

 bullfinch become quite black if the little songster be subjected 

 to the long continued use of hemp-seed alone as food. 



On the Lake of Zirknitz in Carniola. 



In the fifth volume of the " ZeitscTirift fur Physih;' M. Le- 

 ander Knopfer gives a description of the Lake of Zirknitz as 

 he found it during a visit in 1837. He says, that when he ob- 

 tained a view of the village of Zirknitz, and the small towns 

 lying around it in the plain, he looked in vain for a sheet of 

 water resembling a lake ; he could only see on the opposite 

 hills a longitudinal white stripe, which at a distance had the 

 aspect of a sandy steppe. This was in fact the deep bed of the 

 lake, in which the small quantity of water remaining behind 

 flowed in separate large channels like artificially formed canals 

 (which rendered impossible an ascent for any great distance), 

 towards several larger openings, into which it fell with a rum- 

 bling noise. Two of these breaches were distinguished by 

 their size and considerable depth. Several, perhaps all, of 

 these passages for water, might soon unite, in their subterra- 

 nean course, into one and the same canal, or might soon again 

 separate, according as the power of the water could, by its na- 

 tural pressure, form passages in the weathered and perforated 

 beds of limestone. Eventually the water again makes its ap- 

 pearance in Freudenthal, near Ober-Laibach, from copious 

 springs, and forms, by being united in a channel, the river 

 Laibach, which, with exception of the time during which the 

 lake is dry, is navigable at its very source. 



As the whole bottom of the valley in which the lake lies is 

 so shut in all round by mountains, which are branches of the 

 Julian Alps, that the water flowing together can find an exit 

 at no lower point in it. Nature, as it has likewise done in many 

 other places where the same relations exist, formed here a 



