86i 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



find as a result of their inquiry that all cur- 

 rent theories are speculative and inadequate ; 

 they offer several good suggestions for a 

 further study of the subject, two of which 

 are the use of the camera and phonograph 

 as automatic registers. The most important 

 result of the inquiry seems to be the setting 

 forth of how little we know about this de- 

 partment of mental phenomena. 



The Blue Jay's Food. A recent inquiry 

 by F. E. L. Beal, assistant of the United 

 States Department of Agriculture, into the 

 food of the blue jay resulted in some unex- 

 pected results. The bird is distributed over 

 the whole of the United States east of the 

 great plains, and has a bad reputation, being 

 charged not only with habitually robbing the 

 nests of smaller birds of their eggs and 

 young, but also with being very destructive 

 to the farmer's grain. Mr. Beal examined 

 two hundred and ninety-two stomachs in all. 

 The remains of a small bird were found in 

 two of these and portions of eggshells in 

 three. He found that vegetable stuff made 

 up three quarters of the blue jay's food, a 

 good share of which is nuts and mast and 

 wild berries. Their insect food makes up 



about twenty-three per cent of the whole, 

 and consists largely of noxious and destruc- 

 tive sorts. He concludes as follows : " The 

 most striking point in the study of the food 

 of the blue jay is the discrepancy between 

 the testimony of field observers concerning 

 the bird's nest-robbing proclivities and the 

 results of stomach examinations. The accu- 

 sations of eating eggs and young birds are 

 certainly not sustained, and it is futile to at- 

 tempt to reconcile the conflicting statements 

 on this point, which must be left until more 

 accurate observations have been made. In 

 destroying insects the jay undoubtedly does 

 much good. Most of the predaceous beetles 

 which it eats do not feed on other insects to 

 any great extent. On the other hand, it de- 

 stroys some grasshoppers and caterpillars 

 and many noxious beetles, such as scara- 

 baeids, click beetles, weevils, buprestids, 

 chrysomelids, and tenebrionids. The blue 

 jay gathers its fruit from Nature's orchard 

 and vineyard, not from man's. Corn is the 

 only vegetable food for which the farmer 

 suffers any loss, and here the damage is 

 small. In fact, the examination of nearly 

 three hundred stomachs shows that the blue 

 jay certainly does far more good than harm." 



MINOR PARAGRAPHS. 



As the result of some recently conducted 

 experiments on feeding hogs, it is announced 

 by the Cornell University experiment sta- 

 tion that fully twenty-five per cent of the dis- 

 eases which are supposed by the farmer to 

 be hog cholera, or some other of the infec- 

 tious diseases which attack hogs, are simply 

 due to unhealthy food or foul surroundings. 

 It was found, among other things, that the 

 dishwater from hotels (which forms the 

 basis of the ordinary swill fed about towns) 

 was especially injurious when any of the pow- 

 dered soaps had been used for dishwashing 

 purposes, and a large number of deaths 

 among several herds were traced to this 

 cause. The amount of free alkali, over 

 fifty per cent, which is present in these soap 

 powders in the shape of sodium carbonate 

 (ordinary washing soda) was found to be the 

 dangerous substance. 



Is it possible, asks a writer in the Revue 

 Scientifique, " to affirm positively that any 

 particular medicine is injurious or any treat- 



ment bad? Assuredly not; what we con- 

 demn to-day will be good to-morrow. Did 

 not the Sorbonne condemn quinine, tartar 

 emetic, and antimony as injurious medicines ? 

 It was the same with transfusion. Science 

 is revolutionized every moment by new dis- 

 coveries. A doctor practicing laparotomy 

 thirty years ago as it is practiced now would 

 have been regarded as guilty of imprudence ; 

 yet the operation is very easily performed, 

 perhaps too readily. There was a time when 

 to give more than a gramme and a half or two 

 grammes of iodide of potassium would have 

 been a great fault ; now, eighteen and even 

 twenty grammes are given. Twenty-five 

 years ago some doctors and even academi- 

 cians denied that smallpox was contagious." 



Dr. Brinton, in a recent number of 

 Science, calls attention to a paper by the 

 Marquis de Nadaillac on The End of the 

 Human Race, and comments as follows : 

 " Making anew the calculation of the increase 

 of population as compared with the increase 



