March 24, 1870] 
NEAL TAREE 
53 
for five weeks,” he writes to Diodati, in 1637, “ oppressed 
with weakness and other infirmities, from which my age, 
seventy-four years, permits me not to hope release. Added 
to this, rok dolor/ the sight of my right eye, that eye 
whose labours (I dare say it) have had such glorious 
results, is for ever lost. That of the left, which was and 
is imperfect, is rendered null by a continual weeping.” 
Thus the poor old man complained, until finding that his 
blindness was incurable, and that his many ills were in- 
creasing, he ceased repining, and begged his friends to 
remember him in their prayers, till his unhappy chequered 
life was closed by death. 
G. FARRER RODWELL. 
OUR BOOK SHELF 
Reptiles and Birds. A Popular Account of their various 
Orders, with a Description of the Habits and Eco- 
nomy of the most interesting. By Louis Figuier. 
Illustrated with 307 woodcuts. Edited and adapted 
by Parker Gillmore. 1870, (London: Chapman 
and Hall.) 
A VERY pretty book for a drawing-room table. The 
description of the several families of both reptiles and 
birds is filled with anecdotes culled from all sorts of 
writers, some of them sufficiently amusing, others, to say 
the least, of doubtful accuracy ; witness the following in 
reference to the stork :—“ The inhabitants of Smyrna, 
who know how far the males carry their feelings of conju- 
gal honour, make these birds the subject of rather a cruel 
amusement. They divert themselves by placing hen’s 
eggs in the nest of the stork. At the sight of this unusual 
production the male allows a terrible suspicion to gnaw 
his heart. By the help of his imagination he soon per- 
suades himself that his mate has betrayed him; in spite of 
the protestations of the poor thing he delivers her over 
to the other storks who are drawn together by his cries, 
and the innocent and unfortunate victim is pecked to 
pieces.” We should like to see this cruel amusement 
played out once to the bitter end, and should then, but 
not till then, believe it. 
The drawings and woodcuts are as excellent as they are 
numerous. 
Beitrage zur Lehre von den Functionen der Nerven- 
centren des Frosches. “ Essays on the Functions of 
the Nerve-centres in the Frog.” By. Prof. D. Fried. 
Goltz, of Konigsberg. pp. 130. (Berlin, Hirschwald, 
1869.) 
THIS little brochure, which, though small, contains the 
result of much work, is divided into four sections. 1. On 
the reflectorial excitation of the voice in frogs. 2. Onthe 
physiology of generation in the frog. 3. On the inhibitory 
influence which can be exerted on the reflex actions ; and 
4. On the seat of the mind (Seele) in frogs ; beside inves- 
tigations on the centre for the maintenance of equipoise, 
and the centre for locomotion. It may be observed that 
notwithstanding the experiments were all undertaken in 
frogs, those little martyrs to science, yet that some of the 
results at least have a direct bearing on the functions of 
the centra in the higher animals, and even on man him- 
self. The results of his experiments in reference to the 
seat of the mind are at variance with those of Pfliiger 
and others, who hold that the spinal cord participates 
with the brain in its possession. M. Goltz maintains, on 
the contrary, that the brain is the exclusive seat of all 
intellectual processes, and consequently, that a frog from 
which the whole encephalon has been removed, is an 
organism presenting only a complex series of reflex pro- 
cesses. The removal of the cevebrum alone deprives the 
animal of all voluntary movement, and of all those 
faculties which are included under the general head of 
consciousness; it still retains, however, certain powers of 
co-ordination. If the corpora quadrigemina are then 
removed, it no longer possesses the power of preserving 
the equipoise of its body or the accommodation of its 
movements. The corpora quadrigemina therefore, he 
concludes, constitute the centre for the maintenance of the 
equilibrium of the body. The cerebellum, on the other 
hand, is the centre for locomotion of the whole body. 
Schriften der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft in Danzig 
Neue Folge, Zweiten Bandes, Zweite Heft, 1869. 
THE Danzig Natural History Society publishes annually 
a part of its Transactions, which, although but little known 
in this country, often contain valuable papers. In the part 
for 1869, which we have just received, we find an elaborate 
memoir by Dr. Bail, on the epizootic fungi which affect 
the caterpillars injurious to forests, and it is some comfort 
to think, that while these vegetable parasites do nothing 
but mischief among the silk establishments of the south 
of Europe, they are regarded as serviceable in other 
quarters. This part also contains the continuation of 
M. A. Menge’s valuable monograph of the Prussian 
spiders, of which the author has now described and 
figured 157 species. This memoir is indispensable to the 
archeologist, and is in itself a wonderful result of the 
most minute research—research so minute, in fact, that 
the author is unfortunately led to magnify the import- 
ance of slight differences, and thus to establish a great 
number of new genera upon very slight grounds. M. 
Menge also describes and figures a species of scorpion 
and two species of spiders from amber; each of the latter 
forms the type of a new genus. Dr. Bail contributes a 
short but interesting paper on the occurrence of andro- 
gynous flowers in moncecious and dicecious plants. Besides 
some minor communications on subjects connected with 
natural history, the part contains two memoirs which one 
would hardly expect to find in the Transactions of a society 
of naturalists, namely, a description of the construction and 
theory of a marine distance-measurer, and an investiga- 
tion of the moon with reference to its ellipsoidal form, by 
M. E. Kayser, who describes himself as ‘‘ Astronomer to 
the Natural History Society of Danzig.” The former of 
these papers is illustrated with three folding plates. 
Notes on Microscopic Crystals included in some Minerals. 
By Isaac Lea. From the Proceedings of the 
Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. Read 
February 16 and May 11, 1869. 
IN these two papers the author gives an account of the 
minute crystals included in sapphire, garnets, and several 
other minerals, which in some cases are arranged in a 
number of definite planes, so as to give rise to the ap- 
pearance seen in the so-called “star sapphires.” ‘The 
essays are illustrated by a plate, which shows the cha- 
racter of the crystals in a very satisfactory manner. The 
author is, however, not quite correct in thinking that such 
included crystals had not been previously described 
by several authors. Séchting, in his excellent work, * 
gives an account of some facts similar to those observed 
by Mr. Lea ; and Messrs. Sorby and Butler, in their paper 
on the microscopical structure of rubies, sapphires, &c.+ 
describe “the small plate-like crystals, often triangular in 
form, with an angle very acute. They are very thin, and 
arranged parallel to three principal planes of the sap- 
phire,’ and are thus precisely like those now figured by 
Mr. Lea. There can be no doubt that the study of the 
minute crystals included in minerals often throws much 
light on their origin, and they play a far more important 
part than is often supposed, and serve to explain some 
of the discrepancies met with in their chemical composition. 
* Einschliisse von Mineralen u. s. w. Freiberg, 1860. 
+ Proceedings of the Royal Society, vol. xvii., p. 291. 
