PRESERVING EGG-SHELLS. 67 
shell. You need not be fearful of getting the liquor 
into your mouth ; for, as soon as it rises in the shell, 
the cold will strike your finger and: thumb, and then 
you cease sucking. Shake the shell just as you did 
when the water was in it, and then blow the solu- 
tion back into the glass. Your egg-shell is now 
beyond the reach of corruption; the membrane 
retains for ever its pristine whiteness ; ancno insect, 
for the time to come, will ever venture to prey upon 
it. Ifyou wish your egg to appear extremely bril- 
liant, give it a coat of mastic varnish, put on very 
sparingly with a camel-hair pencil. Green or blue 
eggs must be done with gum arabic, because the 
mastic varnish is apt to injure the colour. 
This is all. How dull I have been, not to have 
found out this simple process long ago! I have 
used the solution to preserve skins, furs, and fea- 
thers from putrefaction and the moth, for nearly 
twenty years; still the idea never struck me, till 
three weeks ago, that it could be so serviceable in 
preventing all tendency to putrefaction in the mem- 
brane of the shell, which had given me so much 
trouble, and caused so many useless experiments. 
I trust that the kind-hearted naturalist will not turn 
this little process of preparing eggs into affliction to 
poor birds. One egg out of each nest (with a few 
exceptions) will not be missed by the owner; but 
to take them all away would be hard indeed. Such 
an act would make the parent bird as sad and 
sorrowful as Niobe. You know Niobe’s story: Apollo 
slew her every child. 
My friend, George Walker of Killingbeck Lodge, 
F2 
