32 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[February 1, 1901. 



entirely lacking in finer appreciations. Indeed it is very 

 questionable whether there was anything very fine to 

 appreciate. If Falstail cried out of sack, and of women, 

 of devils, the whore of Babylon, and the flea, on 

 Bardolph's nose that reminded him of a black soul in 

 hell-fire, his conscience may have been troubling him 

 sorely enough, but it niay be doubted whether his 

 thoughts ever ran on rustic scenes of Nature in her 

 IJurity and grace. Certainly if they did, the hostess 

 would dismiss them as " rheumatic " again, aad they 

 would never be retained in her dull and prosaic mind. 



It is to be feared then that Theobald's conjectiu-e, 

 beautiful as it is, must be abandoned, and as the same 

 fate has befallen evei-y other conjectm'e, we aa-e forced 

 back upon the text of the folios. Is it possible to- make 

 sense of this ? The question is well worth answering : 

 for if we can make sense of the original, the need for 

 eonendation disappears at once, and evei-y conjecture, 

 good or bad, must fall to the ground. 



" His nose was as sharp as a pen and a table of green 

 fields " has been supposed to mean that his nose had a 

 pointed look and was covered with spots. But this 

 seems to be forcing the language. Besides green is 

 hardly the colour one would expect on Falstaff's nose, 

 whether in spots or othei-wise. A much better plan 

 soems tO' be to take the clause, " For his nose was as 

 sharp as a pen " as parenthetical. The sentence then 

 I'eads, " I knew there was but one way (for his nose was 

 as sharp as a pen) and a table of green fields." Sir John 

 had only one more road to go, and that was the road 

 to the churchyard, ending amid the little green mounds 

 that are scattered over God's acre 



This suggestion is oflEered with a good deal of diffi- 

 dence ; yet haply it may do something to clear up an 

 admittedly difficult reading. 



Astronomical. — Professors Liveing and Dewar have 

 obtained evidence of the possible existence in our atmo- 

 sphere of the chief gases which are luminous in the 

 solar corona and in nebulae. After freezing out the 

 more condensable gases, such as argon, nitrogen, and 

 oxygen, by exposing the mixture of gases to the tem- 

 perature of liquid hydrogen, the spectnim of the residue 

 was found to contain lines of hydrogen, helium, and 

 neon, together with certain imknown lines. Among 

 the latter were several weak lines which seem to corre- 

 spond with the principal lines in .Sir Norman Lockyer's 

 list of coronal radiations, and in one experiment a line 

 was obtained which falls very uoai' to the chief nebular 

 line in the green. The experiments also conclusively 

 demonstrate the existence of free hydrogen in our atmo- 

 sphere. 



The approaching oppoition of Mars has already brought 

 a crop of sensational newspaper pai-agraphs. Early in 

 December, Mr. Douglass, of the Lowell Observatory, 

 announced the obsei-vation of a ]nojec.tion on the 

 northeni edge of the Icarium Marc, which remained 

 visible for seventy minutes. In newspaper language : 

 " A seines of bright lights suddenly appeared in a 



straight line extending for several hundred kilometres." 

 In its exaggerated form the observation of coui'se 

 suggests a message from the Martians, but tlic actual 

 obsei-vation is by no means so conclusive.— A. F. 



Botanical. — The Grasswrack (Zostera marina), a 

 common plant of sandy or muddy places near the sea 

 in Britain and other temperate countries, has been dis- 

 covered by Captain Deasy in the Kuen Lun Mountains, 

 Tibet, at an elevation of 16,500 feet. Specimens collected 

 in this extraordinary situation were exhibited by Dr. 

 A. B. Rendle at a recent meeting of the Linnean 

 Society. They were not growing when discovered, but 

 were preserved in what is believed to have been the bed 

 of a salt lake. Though dry and brittle, a microscopic 

 examination revealed an internal stnicture as perfect 

 as that of living specimens. This species has never 

 previously been found in an inlaiid lake, though the 

 Dwarf Grasswrack (Z. nana) is known from the Caspian 

 Sea. In the Journal of Botany for January we are 

 informed that a paper on Captain Deasy's interesting 

 discovery will shortly appeal- in that publication. 



Primula ohconica, since its introduction into our 

 gai-den® twenty years agO', has been the subject of con- 

 siderable attention, both on account of its wonderfully 

 floriferous cliai-acter and poisonous properties. Instances 

 of skin irritation, sometimes of a vei-y violent nature, 

 caused by handling the plant, have been recorded fiom 

 time to time in the Garden and Purest, the Gardeners' 

 Chronicle, and other journals. A valuable contribution 

 to the literature concerning this Primula has been 

 supplied by Herr A. Nestler in the BeriMe der deutschen 

 hotanisclien Gesellschaft for 1900. The author pives 

 the results of a series of experiments which he conducted 

 with the view of ascertaining what paii; of the plant 

 produces the iiTitation. He found that water, which 

 collected on the margins of the leaves when tiie plant 

 was placed in a moist i-oom, or juice, which he expressed 

 from the leaves and flower stalks, had no effect. A 

 young umbel applied to the wrist by an elastic band 

 for two lioui's proved almost harmless ; but a piece from 

 the base of a leaf-stalk applied in the same way for two 

 hours produced acute iri-itation with blisters and swel- 

 ling of the arm. Herr Nestler shows that it is the 

 yellowish-green matter in the glandular hairs which 

 possesses the poisonous properties. — S. A. S. 



Entomological. — The " driver " ants of America and 

 Aft-ica are well known to readers of the works of Belt 

 and other travellers in the tropics. For a long time the 

 " worker " ants included under this designation could 

 not be refeiTed to the same species as any known forms 

 of developed females or males. Dr. SharjD, in the " Cam- 

 bridge Natural History ' (Vol. VI., pp. 174f.), gave a 

 summary of recent researches which have established 

 the remarkable fact that the developed forms of several 

 African species of " driver " ants had long been known 

 to natiu-alists under distinct generic titles, so mai'ked 

 is the divergence between the forms in these insects. 

 Quite lately Prof. W. M. Wheeler describes (American 

 Naturalist, XXXIV., 1900, pp. 563-574) the hitherto 

 unknown female of Eciton, the American genus of 

 driver ants (the male had ali-eady been described under 

 a different generic name). These females arc, like the 

 workers, wingless, but they differ most remarkably iii 

 size and form, being foui* times as lai-gc, and having 

 only one " nodal " segment in the hind body. The 

 woi'kers have two., and this character of the " nodal ' 

 segments is a leading one in discriminating the sub- 

 families of ants; here, however, it varies in the same 



