200 STATE TOPOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



nutrition has ceased and growth lias culminated. The erythrophyl, or peculiar 

 red substance which the young unfolding leaves contain in early spring, before 

 the chlorophyl has had time to develop itself, and which gives them their 

 peculiar autumnal tint, passes away as the season advances, lingering only in 

 the leaf-stalks, which usually continue from first to last of a reddish hue ; but 

 it reappears in autumn, when the chlorophyl has vanished from the leaves; only 

 it is then more oxidized, and becomes completely discolored by further oxida- 

 tion, as in the fallen leaves that have lain long on the ground. We thus see a 

 most interesting connection between the leaves of spring and those of autumn ; 

 and are deeply impressed by the wonderful co-relation between the tinting of 

 the smallest and most obscure leaf of the forest, and the changing cpialities cf 

 the sunshine. The leaf changes as the sunbeam itself changes : and as the 

 light of heaven fades through all the hues of the spectrum, from the darker 

 actinic to the brighter parathermic, so does the sympathetic leaf pass through 

 from the dark screen colors of summer to those brilliant tints of autumn whose 

 line effect in the landscape we all admire. — Dr. MacMillan, in Scientific Former. 



CATS IX AGRICULTURE. 



Mrs. Swisshelm gives a chapter in the Pittsburg Commercial on "Cats," that 

 entomologists will not be slow to appropriate to their use in arguing the bird- 

 insect question. She says : If our agricultural societies would offer premiums 

 for the scalps of these domestic tigers, just as counties used to do for those of 

 their more harmless first cousins, wolves, we would in a few years be done not 

 only with the green worms, but the green grasshoppers, which come up like a 

 cloud and spread over the land, because the millions of birds that should be on 

 hand to eat them as they come out of the ground have been destroyed by our 

 pet tigers. 



No one who has not paid attention to the subject can have any idea of the 

 number of birds and birds' nests destroyed in one year by one cat, and to me it 

 is a wonder that there are any birds left in the United States. To be sure, 

 there arc very few. I have heard more bird songs here in Leipsic in the seven 

 weeks I have been here than I ever did in seven years at home, and there I 

 lived most of the time in the country, while here I am in the city. Our street 

 terminates abruptly on the confines of a garden which must embrace twenty 

 acres, and surrounded on three sides by high houses. Our block is the last on 

 the street, and our rooms at the end next to this garden, which is full of tall 

 trees and shrubbery and flowers and pleasant walks, and I think there are more 

 birds in it than in Cherryhill township, Indiana county, Pennsylvania, in which 

 our summer home was situated, and which is a very large township, not less 

 than twenty miles square. 



Every family there but one kept cats to amuse the children and catch rats, and 

 as a cat never touches a rat while it can get a bird, or a nest of birds or eggs, and 

 as i hey can easily follow a bird to its nest and cannot follow a rat to its, there 

 are not many birds left when cats fall to catching rats. Nobody raises fruit 

 there except by accident. All the trees were decorated with caterpillar's nests, 

 and the last year we were there the worms attacked the elder bushes and black- 

 berries, ihe main dependence of the people for fruit. 



