736 SCIENTIFIC RECORD FOR 1883. 



excite the fibers of the auditory nerve distributed in the lower part, and 

 the deeper notes of the fibers distributed in the upper part. In animals 

 which are low in the scale of development there is a similar arrangement, 

 which consists of auditory cilia of different lengths, which have the same 

 function, as the shorter ones are intended for the higher notes, and the 

 longer ones for the deeper notes and noises, and are set into synchronous 

 vibration by them. This hypothesis has been experimentally confirmed 

 in the case of the auditory cilia of the lower animals, and it had actually 

 turned out true that deep notes produced vibrations in the long hairs 

 and high notes in the short ones." 



During the past year Dr. B. Baginsky, of Berlin, experimented on dogs, 

 with a view of ascertaining to what extent the Helmholtzian hypothesis 

 was applicable to the cochlea of the mammals. The difficulties to be 

 encountered were, of course, great, but they were partly overcome. " He 

 wounded the top of the cochlea of the healthy ear in dogs which had 

 been made absolutely deaf of their other ear, and then observed their 

 hearing powers by means of the different notes of organ pipes between 

 c and c'"". On the third day after the immediate consequences of the 

 operative interference had disappeared, it was found that the d v ogs 

 responded perfectly to the notes c"'", c"", c'", c", but were deaf to the 

 deeper notes. This condition remained unaltered for weeks, and when 

 the animal that had been the subject of experiment was killed, post-mor- 

 tem examination showed that the top only of the cochlea had been 

 wounded, and that the filaments of the auditory nerve that were dis- 

 tributed to that portion were destroyed. Less precise were the results 

 of the experiments in which the lower part of the cochlea was destroyed." 

 The result on the whole, however, supported the hypothesis of Helm- 

 holtz. (Am. Nat, vol. xvn, pp. 1195-1196.) 



Milk-giving Males. — A number of cases have been recorded in which the 

 male had developed functional mammary glands, and even man has given 

 sometimes quite copiously milk therefrom. Such cases, however, are 

 always of interest. The observations of Dr. 0. Hart Merriam, made in 

 1872, on the milk-giving faculty of males of the so-called Baird's Hare 

 have been recalled recently in Nature (vol. xxvii, p. 241), and a corre- 

 spondent in a subsequent number (vol. xxvn, p. 207) revived an old 

 account of a he-goat which gave milk. In the island of Amboyna, in 

 1546, the famed Saint Francis Xavier found "a he-goat giving suck to 

 his young kids with his own milk; he had one breast which gave every 

 day as much milk as would fill a basin"; this, the saintly Jesuit wrote, 

 he saw with "his own eyes." 



South American extinct Mammals. — While the paleontologists of the 

 United States have been rewarded by the rich discoveries of extinct 

 mammals whose fame has already been widely bruited, a corps of investi- 

 gators has sprung up in the southern continent who are being almost 

 equally recompensed for their labor by strange new types. Perhaps the 





