210 NORTH AMERICAN MUSTELID.E. 



"Dr. Warren also exhibited to the Society a living specimen 

 of Mephitis Americana, which had been deprived of its power 

 of annoyance by a surgical operation. The animal was first 

 made partially iuseusible by enclosing him in a barrel in which 

 was placed some chloric ether. As he became stupefied, a 

 sponge coutainiug the amtsthetic agent was placed over the 

 nostrils and kept there until entire insensibility was produced. 

 Dr. Warren then cut down, on the outside of the intestine, 

 upon the ducts of the glands and divided them, suffering the 

 glands to remain in sitil. The animal recovered, being en- 

 tirely deprived of his means of annoyance by the adhesive 

 inflammation following the operation.'' 



Here the matter rested (so far as I am acquainted with the 

 record) until 1871, when Dr. J. S. Parker published an account 

 of a dissection in the American Naturalist, as above quoted. 

 Besides being not quite accurate in eff'ect, though the observer 

 really recognized the condition of the parts, the account is too 

 diffuse to justify transcription as a whole ; yet it is particularly 

 noteworthy as giving the first and probably the only account 

 to date of the physical properties of the fluid itself : — '^ .... 

 I dipped the point of my scalpel in the yellow fluid, put the 

 tenth or twentieth of a drop of it on a glass, covered it with 

 another strip of glass, and placed it under a power of forty 

 diameters in my microscope. The appearance was peculiar. 

 It looked like molten gold, or like quicksilver of the finest 

 golden color. Pressure on the strips of glass made it flow like 

 globules of melted gold. By a power of sixty diameters the 

 same color still appeared, but seemed as if it would by a higher 

 power resolve itself into globules, with some peculiar mark- 

 ings To the eye, the peculiar and odoriferous secre- 

 tion of this animal is of a pale bright or glistening yellow, with 

 specks floating in it. By the microscope it looks like a clear 

 fluid, as water with masses of gold in it, and the specks like 

 bubbles of air, covered with gold, or rather bags of air in 

 golden sacks. The air I take to be the gas nascent from the 

 golden fluid. Had I known that my interest in the dissection 

 would have rendered me so forgetful of the pungent surround- 

 ings, I would have had chemical reagents to test the substance 

 so easily obtainable. 



'•Another thing was a matter of interest. If I correctly made 

 out the capsule of fluid, the commonly called ' glands ' are the 

 muscular tunic enveloping and callable of compressing the 



