Short Papers and Notes. SE 
boiling water in such a position that a fish missing its spring would 
tumble into the pot. Neither story may be true, though there is 
nothing improbable in,either. M. Leclercq narrates how two 
Irishmen tried to cook their dinner at the Strockhr, in Iceland. A 
shoulder of mutton was wrapped in the body of a flannel shirt, 
and in each sleeve a plover was placed, and the load dropped into 
the geyser. After waiting for halfan-hour, the shirt (with its con- 
tents) was hurled up high into the air, and landed on the brink of 
the basin. The mutton was “cooked as in England,” the French 
writer discreetly observes. But nothing was left of the birds 
except skin and bones. All colour had fled from the skirt, though 
the fabric remained uninjured. The hot-water basins both in the 
Yellowstone and in New Zealand are in great demand as bathing- 
places. Towards the close of the fourteenth century, Nicolo 
Zeno saw Icelandic monks heating their rooms with the thermal 
springs in Julianehaab District, in South Greenland. To make a 
washing-tub of a crater is to utilise the forces of Nature to the 
utmost limits of prosaicism.—From “ Our Earth and its Story.” 
Right=handedness. 
Around the youthful pupil stand parents, nurse, preceptor, all 
anxious that he should leave off the use of the “‘ wrong hand,” 
either in labour, or as a matter of courtesy. So persistent and 
universal is this education that some authorities have deemed the 
_ whole difference between right and left hand an affair of fashion ; 
and that if both hands were educated alike, it would be a great 
gain. . . Nevertheless, if right-handedness be a fashion, it is all 
but universal, and the most ancient fashion we know. The history 
of writing, the evidence of language, and the drawings and tools, 
not only of Egyptians, Assyrians, Greeks, and Romans, but of 
races the memory of whose existence had passed away ere the 
earliest extant records had been penned, and whose rude tools, 
and weapons, and artistic representations have been disinterred 
from caves, kitchen-middens, and crannogs, give us early evidence 
of right-handedness. These drawings represent faces in profile, 
looking towards the left, just as a street Arab, unless he be left- 
handed, chalks them on any unoccupied surface. Such is a sketch 
of the mammoth, on a piece of ivory, found in the rock-shelter at 
La Madeleine, in the Dordogne. So, also, is the reindeer, etched 
with great spirit and skill on bones procured from a cave near 
Bruniquel. Another drawing, in which an eel, two horses’ heads, 
and what Dr. E. B. Tylor has pronounced as possibly the earliest 
known portrait of man, represents the implement held in the right 
hand. Professor Daniel Wilson has given three engravings of 
bronze sickles from the lake of Brienne, all constructed for right- 
