262 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Par 



some of the human kind, they live upon their neighbour's 

 bounty, it must be admitted that they sometimes reward their 

 benefactor by adorning it with their beautiful flowers. The 

 Eafflesia Arnoldi, for example, whose flower is three feet across, 

 and whose cup will contain several pints of fluid, grows attached 

 to the stem of a climbing cistus in Sumatra. The misletoe 

 also, whose silvery berries adorn the oak. Whether these 

 offerings of the parasite bear any reasonable proportion to the 

 amount of damage done by it must be a question open to doubt. 

 Certain it is that the offerings of the social parasite to his 

 benefactor, consisting as they do of subservience, flattery, and 

 petty traits, are no real benefit to anybody ; whilst, on the 

 other hand, the injury which the parasite does to honesty and 

 manliness is most unmistakable. On the whole, we are inclined 

 to think that all the productions of parasites, whether vegetable 

 or human, are not sufficient to make us value the producers 

 very highly. v. 



Parliamentary Tactics. 



It is stated that the shocks produced by fishes possessed of 

 electrical organs are sometimes sufficiently intense to kill the 

 animal at once. Hence it is a common practice with the con- 

 ductors of convoys in South America, to collect a number of 

 wild horses and drive them across the rivers in order to exhaust 

 the gymnotes of their electricity before the convoy passes. 

 Parliamentary leaders in St. Stephen's understand the wisdom 

 of adopting an analogous policy. They are aware that the 

 slippery eels of the Government Opposition possess considerable 

 power during their early sessional attacks. They therefore "so 

 arrange their measures as to induce the Oppositionites to dis- 

 charge their most fatal shafts upon those whose ruin will not 

 be of much consequence. Then, when the Opposition electricity 

 is exhausted, and towards the end of the session, the parlia- 

 mentary leaders carry forward without any dangerous resist- 

 ance all that they deem of most importance. s. 



