332 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
We subsequently learned that a day or two before some 
young fellows from the city had been down here and with new 
fangled, hard-shooting guns had amused themselves as no In- 
dian would have done by shooting up Cranetown. They had 
killed or crippled many of the young birds and some of the 
old ones that had ventured within range of their rifles. 
The next year a lesser number of the herons came back and 
tried to resurrect the town, but they were again shot up and 
thenceforth Cranetown was a deserted village—a thing of the 
past, 
It is not generally known that the birds were the original 
dancers, and of the several kinds of dancing birds the cranes 
“took the cake.” Nearly all the Phasianidae at times do more 
or less dancing. The old wild gobbler, I have seen several 
times do a very neat “hoedown”’ and the darling little quails 
do a good imitation of a cake-walk. For a regular quadrille 
the sandhill cranes take the blue ribbon. In the early days I 
have seen a party of them on a high piece of ground on the 
Bushnell or West Prairie Country go through a stunt that 
would make a dog laugh. They would form a square and 
after a few preliminary bowings and salutings, they would 
promenade all, four hands forward and back, balance all and 
all the time with an accompaniment of clattering bills much 
like castanets, wings half raised, or an old male with one 
wing raised as he promenades with his partner. Of course it 
is all a matter of courtship and for that matter the modern 
dance 1s also. 
THE EFFECT OF STARVATION ON THE CAGAIASe 
CONTENT OF TISSUES 
AMA J. NEILL, UNIVERSITY oF ILLINOIS 
When an animal is starved or is supplied with an insufficient 
amount of food to meet the wear and tear and energy require- 
tents of the body, the tissues themselves are consumed. The 
extent of this consumption differs very widely in the different 
organs. The heart for example, loses very little in weight 
while the skeletal muscles lose much, the fat and glycogen com- 
pletely disappear. The organs in which metabolism is most 
