POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



857 



a student of the institution, " an exception- 

 ally intelligent American of one-and-twenty 

 years," without much experience in that 

 work, to do the sowing, and who moved as 

 rapidly as the other man had moved delib- 

 erately. He scattered nitrate of soda at the 

 rate of 194 pounds to the acre, and muriate 

 of potash at the rate of 116 pounds. The 

 laborer's work may be regarded as a useful 

 indication of what would actually happen in 

 case the specified fertilizers, says Professor 

 Storer, were sown by hand. It will be no- 

 ticed that the figures of the table agree very 

 well with certain rules or statements cur- 

 rent in agricultural journals, concerning the 

 amounts of saline manures proper to be ap- 

 plied in practice ; and it may well be true 

 that some of these rules were originally 

 based upon observations of the amounts 

 of material that a man could conveniently 

 scatter. 



Snicide a Prodact of Fast Modern Life. 



— The " Lancet," noticing the increased 

 prominence which suicides have appeared 

 to assume in recent years, and believing 

 that a large proportion of those crimes are 

 the deliberate, conscious acts of persons 

 overburdened with the cares of life or dread- 

 ing some terror, attributes the increase to 

 the fast rate of modern life. Boys and 

 girls, it says, " are men and women in their 

 acquaintance with and experiences of life 

 and its so-called pleasures and sorrows, at 

 an age when our grandparents were inno- 

 cent children in the nursery. . . . Life is 

 played out before its meridian is reached, 

 or the burden of responsibility is thrust 

 upon the consciousness at a period when 

 the mind can not in the nature of things be 

 competent to cope with its weight and at- 

 tendant difficulties. . . . Forced education, 

 commenced too early in life and pressed too 

 fast, is helping to make existence increas- 

 ingly difficult. . . . Hasty and too early 

 marriages, too anxious struggles for success 

 in life, too hazardous adventures in business 

 enterprise, the rush of undisciplined and 

 untrained minds into the arena of intellect- 

 ual strife, and, above all, that swinging of 

 the self-consciousness, pendulum-like, be- 

 tween excess in rigor of self-control and 

 untempered license, which constitutes the 

 inner experience of too many, are proxi- 



mate causes of the break-down or agony of 

 distress which ends in suicide. The under- 

 lying cause is impatience, social, domestic, 

 and personal, of the period of preparation 

 which Nature has ordained to stand on the 

 threshold of life, but which the haste of 

 progress treats as delay." 



Oil and Earths as Food for Mice. — Pro- 

 fessor Storer, of the Bussey Institution, has 

 discovered that mice, when short of food, 

 are capable of eating putty and of living 

 upon the oil which they assimilate from it. 

 Their capacity for feeding upon oil was 

 demonstrated to him when one morning he 

 found the wicks of the lamps which his 

 workmen had left overnight in the cellar 

 drawn and combed out, and the oil all sucked 

 from them. Some months later he had sev- 

 eral panes of glass set in the windows with 

 new putty ; a few days afterward he found 

 the putty all eaten off. After making these 

 observations, he began experimenting. He 

 caged some mice, and, having fed them oats 

 till they became accustomed to their new 

 quarters, he cut down the supply of oats to 

 just enough to keep them in good case, and 

 gave fresh putty— ten or twelve balls, large 

 enough to just pass through a three-eighth- 

 inch hole to three mice. This putty, weigh- 

 ing twenty grammes (IG'T grammes of whit- 

 ing and 33 grammes of oil), furnished five 

 and a half grammes of whiting, or one third of 

 its weight, to each animal. The whiting was 

 passed off as an oilless dung, which became 

 very large, white, and friable. It was rela- 

 tively the same as if a man of about one hun- 

 dred and fifty pounds weight were to eat and 

 pass off fifty pounds of chalk a day ! The 

 mice would eat no more than the quantity 

 named. If their allowance was increased, 

 the surplus was left. To prove that it was 

 for the sake of the oil that the putty was 

 eaten, balls of whiting mixed with water, 

 and of gypsum and water, were tried. They 

 were not eaten ; only a few of them were 

 scratched enough to satisfy the mice that 

 there was no oil in them. Red ochre when 

 substituted for the whiting was eaten the 

 first day, with the production of red dung, 

 but was not eaten on the second day. It 

 was better relished when mixed with whit- 

 ing, but the mice soon tired of it in that 

 shape. Yellow ochre was hardly more ac- 



