1902 Telcgony in Dogs 59 



Winter on the marshes is not without its signs of coming 

 spring. True, the catkins of the rugged alders and silvery 

 birches in the " carrs," as the marshfolk call the copses, had 

 not begun to lengthen ; but every marsh was studded with 

 prickly stars, from the midst of which the tall stems of the 

 handsome marsh-thistle (Cnictts palustris) would appear, and 

 along the river -walls the cleavers were sending up little 

 shoots like Chinese pagodas in miniature. On a heap of 

 rotting dyke-drawings some chickweed bore a few tiny white 

 flowers amid the green leaves of the sorrel dock, dove's-foot 

 crane's-bill, and small nettle. (It was just by this heap, to 

 which some plants alien to the marshes had strayed, that I 

 found in the autumn a giant puff-ball (Lycoperdon giganteum), 

 as big as my head.) A delightful surprise, too, awaited me 

 when I came to a marsh near which some marshmen were 

 cutting reeds and carrying them away on their wide flat- 

 bottomed rafts. Glancing over a boggy tract which I had 

 often visited when the beautiful buckbeans were flowering, I 

 saw a patch of bright yellow in the midst of the dark rushes 

 and ruddy sedge. There was no mistaking it. On the 27th 

 January, before the first coltsfoot had pushed its way up 

 through the clods on the river-walls, and when I could not 

 so much as find a single daisy, there was the marsh marigold 

 in bloom. Gilbert White gives March 20 as the first flower- 

 ing date of this plant, yet there it was, on a open marsh 

 exposed to the keen winds from off the North Sea, blooming 

 nearly two months before its time ! 



Telegony in Dogs. 



By J. CossAR EwART, M.D., F.R.S., University of Edinburgh. 



The crude philosophic theories of the eighteenth century 

 gradually gave place during the nineteenth to theories 

 largely based on observation and experiment, with the re- 

 sult that we are now all saying the "age of science" has 

 come and that the " scientific spirit is the spirit of the age." 

 Though it is doubtless true the methods of to-day differ 



