P OP ULAR MIS CELL ANY. 



861 



throw the salt over the left shoulder three 

 mystic times and discomfit the wicked one 

 exceedingly. It is interesting to view the 

 grave solemnity with which the intelligent 

 and well-educated woman of to-day will per- 

 form that ceremony." 



Rock Striatioii by River Ice. — A study of 

 the striation of rocks by river ice has been 

 made by Mr. J. E. Todd in the Mississippi 

 and other Western rivers. While not much 

 attention has been paid to this agency, the 

 author finds that planation and striation 

 are sometimes the work of river ice armed 

 with erratics ; that the situations most fa- 

 vorable for the phenomenon seem to be on 

 the outside of a bend, or near a strong cur- 

 rent, near low-water mark, and below a point 

 where siliceous erratics lie near the water- 

 level. The dynamical conditions necessary 

 are probably a sudden breaking up of the 

 ice before it is rotted by thawing and a flood 

 to wield it. The proper conditions do not 

 often occur in our present Western streams. 

 Usually the strire are parallel, as much so as 

 in glacial action, and commonly on surfaces 

 dipping up stream, but occasionally upon 

 limited areas dipping down stream. While 

 these facts, the author observes, may have 

 no direct significance of practical ralue, they 

 indirectly throw much light upon the pos- 

 sible origin of the extra-morainic drift and 

 of some ancient striated surfaces outside of 

 the moraines. 



Animals not Afraid of Man. — Mr. W. H. 



Hudson's observations of birds in La Plata 

 lead him to different conclusions from those 

 which Darwin and Herbert Spencer have 

 reached respecting their supposed instinctive 

 fear of man or birds of prey antecedent to 

 experience or parental teaching. The one 

 thing that is instinctive, says Mr. Alfred R. 

 Wallace, in his review of the book, " is the 

 alarm caused by the warning note of the 

 parent. This produces an effect even before 

 the chick is hatched, for in three different 

 species belonging to widely separated orders 

 Mr. Hudson has watched the nest while the 

 young bird was chipping its way out of the 

 egg and uttering its feeble peep, when, on 

 hearing the warning cry of the mother- bird, 

 both sounds instantly ceased, and the chick 

 remained quiescent in the shell for a long 



time, or till the parent's changed note showed 

 that the danger was over. Young nestling 

 birds take their food as readily from man as 

 from their parents till they hear the warn- 

 ing cry, when they immediately close their 

 mouths and crouch down frightened in the 

 nest. Parasitical birds, which do not recog- 

 nize the warning cries of their foster-parents, 

 show no fear. The young parasitical cow- 

 bird takes food from man, and exhibits no 

 fear, although the foster-parents are hover- 

 ing close by, screaming their alarm notes, 

 So a young wild dove, reared from the egg 

 by domestic pigeons, which, never being fed, 

 were half wild in their habits, never acquired 

 the wildness of his foster-parents, but be- 

 came perfectly tame and showed no more 

 fear of a man than of a horse. He had 

 none of his own kind to learn from, and did 

 not understand either the voices or the ac- 

 tions of the dove-pigeons. Mr. Hudson has 

 also reared plovers, tinamous, coots, and 

 many other wild birds from eggs hatched by 

 fowls, and found them all quite incapable of 

 distinguishing friend from foe, while some, 

 such as the rhea and the crested screamer, 

 are much tamer when young than domestic 

 chickens and ducklings. Mr. Hudson con- 

 cludes that birds learn to distinguish their 

 enemies, first, from parental warnings, and 

 later by personal experience. 



The Truffle. — In a book on that vege- 

 table, lately published in France, M. Ad. 

 Chatin defines the truffle as a mushroom, 

 which is not a parasite, though it grows by 

 preference in the immediate vicinity of cer- 

 tain kinds of trees ; and like its congeners, 

 the tuberaceous mushrooms, instead of liv- 

 ing in the air it is hypogeous. The truffle is 

 first mentioned by Theophrastus, who calls 

 it mizy and mison, and regards it as a root- 

 less plant engendered by the thundershowers 

 of autumn, but capable, according to many 

 observers, of reproducing itself from seeds 

 brought by storms from Tiaris, on the shores 

 of Mitylene. This truffle, that of Lesbos, 

 was an inferior variety to the truffle of Peri- 

 gord, which is so highly prized by epicures. 

 The truffles of Algeria, called terfas, and 

 those of western Asia, called kames, al- 

 though not equal to those of France, are of 

 considerable importance as food to the Arabs. 

 M. Chatin has added several species, previ- 



