FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



395 



may be found by visiting the spot, 

 where a surface extending along about 

 four miles is covered with blocks of 

 stone, assumed to be meteorites. A 

 church dedicated to St. Prokopy has 

 been built in the neighboring village of 

 LobofF or Catoval, and near it stands a 

 curious little wooden chapel of gi-eat 

 antiquity, the foundation of which was 

 made of the stones that fell. The church 

 Is decorated with pictui-es of St. Pro- 

 kopy and of incidents of the meteoric 

 storm, and one of the stones that fell 

 has been mounted on a pedestal in the 

 cathedral of Ustjug, where it is an ob- 

 ject of devotion. Mr. Melnikoff, Con- 

 servator of the Mineralogical Collections 

 of the Mining Institute of St. Peters- 

 burg, has examined the place and the 

 stones, and finds that they are not me- 

 teoric and heavenly at all, but simply 



earthly granite and sandstone. Yet M. 

 Stanislas Meunier suggests, in La Na- 

 ture, that the story, so carefully treas- 

 ured up for six hundred years, may have 

 a foundation. That such stones as lie 

 on the ground at Catoval may have been 

 taken up and transplanted by a tor- 

 nado of extreme violence he regards 

 as within the possibilities. M. Meunier 

 has himself investigated a phenomenon 

 of the kind in France, where the ground 

 was " mitrailled " with stones measur- 

 ing one, two, and three cubic centime- 

 tres, which had been brought a distance 

 of one hundred and fifty kilometres. 

 Another possible explanation is that the 

 stones were already there, so concealed 

 by the dense growth as not to attract 

 particular attention, but became more 

 plainly ob\'ious when the ground had 

 been cleared by the tornado. 



mi:n'or paragraphs. 



While it recognizes the desirability 

 of agreeing upon some language as a 

 general medium of communication be- 

 tween nations, the London Spectator 

 presents certain forcible reasons for not 

 seeking to institute one universal lan- 

 guage. " Mankind," it says, " will never 

 adopt a universal language, nor is it to 

 be desired that it should. The instru- 

 ment for expressing thought must vary 

 with the character, history, and men- 

 tal range of those who have thoughts 

 to express, and if all men spoke alike, 

 ninety-nine per cent of them would be 

 speaking stiffly — not using, that is, a 

 natural and self-developed vehicle of ex- 

 pression. Arabic could not have grown 

 up among Englishmen, or English 

 among Arabs. The seclusion of nations, 

 too, from one another by the want of 

 a common tongue is by no means all 

 loss, and we may doubt with reason 

 why the higher races would not be de- 

 graded if they understood without ef- 

 fort all that the lower races say to one 

 another. They would be bred, as it 

 were, in the servants' hail, not to their 

 advantage." 



In a recent address on The Chem- 

 istry of the Infinitely Little, M. Gri- 

 maux referred to the fact, with which 

 all who have thought about it have 

 been struck, that pathogenic microbes 

 being diffused all through the atmos- 

 phere, everybody must breathe and ab- 



sorb all sorts of them, including germs 

 of typhoid fever, scarlet fever, diph- 

 theria, etc., and yet we are not all at- 

 tacked with those diseases. "Why? Be- 

 cause each person has a peculiar tem- 

 perament, and cells adapted, to a greater 

 or less extent, to resist the microbe, to 

 destroy it when it enters the organism, 

 and thus constitutes, as the case may 

 be, a good or a bad cultural medium. 

 Every one, we might say, is immune 

 against some or other of the pathogenic 

 microbes. Like immunity belongs also 

 to certain animal species, and if a mi- 

 crobe pathogenic to man or to some 

 other species is injected into them they 

 will resist it. The blood of refractory 

 animals probably contains principles not 

 yet known which oppose the develop- 

 ment of the infectious microbe. From 

 this fact the idea has been suggested of 

 injecting the blood of refractory animals 

 and communicating an artificial immu- 

 nity to the individual to whom the in- 

 jection is applied. 



M. J. Cr^pix, of Paris, " an enthu- 

 siast concerning the goat," as M. de 

 Par\nlle calls him in La Nature, has es- 

 tablished a model goat dairy, and is 

 endeavoring to diffuse a taste for goat's 

 milk and its products. As a means to 

 this end, he has sought to procure an 

 improved breed of goats, and has ob- 

 tained a stock of very satisfactory qual- 

 ity by crossing the best native goats 



