2i2 Short Papers and Notes. 
magnified to the uniform scale of 10,000 diameters, show recog- 
nisable differences in size between the blood-corpuscles of man 
and those of the domestic animals, dog, ox, sheep, and goat, whose 
corpuscles nearest approach in size those of man. 
Al Willage Destroyed by Fce. 
Advices from the fishing village of Kerschkaranza, in Kola, 
a peninsula on the White Sea, describe a wonderful phenomenon, 
new in Arctic annals, which took place on the 5th January, 1888. 
At 4 o’clock in the morning the inhabitants were awakened by a 
series of heavy, dull detonations, like heavy artillery. Shortly 
afterwards a great ice wall, to the north-west, several hundred feet 
high, was seen to be moving towards the village, doubtless in 
consequence of the pressure of the ocean ice outside. The ice- 
hills came slowly but irresistibly onward, and passed over the 
village, which they completely erased, and kept onward for a 
mile inland. The ice travelled a mile and a half in four hours. 
The villagers saved their lives, but little else. 
Remarkable Sbeep. 
A Russian correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette has sent an 
account of an extraordinary race of sheep, This is the Ovzs Polz 
of Marco Polo, which has its habitat in the extreme south-east 
corner of Russian Turkestan. The “ Ovis oli,” we read, is a 
kind of philosopher’s stone, for which all the sportsmen of the 
Himalayas keep searching all their lives. It is an animal twelve 
and a half hands high, with a head and horns which are the envy 
and despair of all the hunters of Asia. Magnificent, indeed, are 
the curved and involuted horns, measuring at least five feet between 
the tips, but each horn, measured from the base along the curves, 
is six feet long. This huge sheep lives in the most inaccessible 
corner of the most mountainous region in all Turkestan, just on the 
north of the Pamir Plateau, the first of the gigantic series of 
mountains that form the northern bulwark of India. It is only in 
July and August when the Alai range can be traversed by 
Europeans, and in these months it 1s the habit of the male Ovzs 
Poli to leave his wives, who brouse on the undulating plateaux 
which are found 10,000 feet above the sea, and retire to enjoy 
bachelor solitude among the snow-peaks that tower to the height 
of 14,000 feet. 
