mrik MICROSCOPE. 
Vou. VI. ANN ARBOR, APRIL, 1886. No. 4. 
ORIGINAL COMMUNICATIONS.: 
THE LAUGHABLE IN SCIENCE. 
CIENCE is not all sober; it hasits funny side; and scientific 
men enjoy a laugh as well as the members of any other 
profession. There are constantly many “ good things” turning 
up over which the student has his smile, or, it may be a hearty 
roar of laughter. Would it not be well to have some place 
where all these items could be gathered together? If not a 
book of humorous items, a department in some scientific mag- 
azine which should correspond to the well-known “ Drawer” of 
Harper’s Magazine? 
These humorous or funny items of science may be classed 
in three categories (classification, be it remembered, is a char- 
acteristic of the scientific mind and we must classify everything 
we study). The first group embraces all those examples where 
the inborn wit of the student cannot be controlled; the subject 
is a good one and the impulse is irresistible. The joke must 
come, no matter if it comes in the pages of the most profound 
disquisition. Hxamples of this sort are comparatively common, 
and we need only cite the remarks which Dr. Gray makes in his 
“Field, Forest, and Garden Botany” concerning the species of 
Lunaria: ‘Common honesty, not natural to the country, but 
cultivated in old-fashioned places. Perennial honesty is a 
much rarer sort, and seldom met with here.” 
A different type is that where a scientific writer uncon- 
sciously places incongruous things together. Instances of this 
sort are not so common, but the writer recently met one in the 
pages of the “ Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Sci- 
ences.” A learned palzontologist described a new species of 
trilobite; the ¢az/ of the specimen was all he possessed, but it 
