POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



861 



somewhat resembling that of creosote, which 

 is very strong and unpleasant in the dead 

 animal. The body, in decaying, passes into 

 a fluid, which the natives of the district say 

 is good for rheumatism. Fowls refuse to 

 touch it, living or dead. When held in the 

 hand the worm, in contracting its body, 

 throws out jets of a milky fluid ; and this 

 fluid seems to be the substance which it uses 

 for coating its burrows to make their walls 

 moist and slippery. The worm moves in its 

 burrow by swelling up one or the other end 

 and pulling or pushing itself along from 

 that. Outside of the burrow it does not at- 

 tempt to get along. The burrows of the 

 large worm measure from three quarters of 

 an inch to an inch in diameter. In disused 

 burrows are often found casts of the worms, 

 and, more rarely, cocoons containing a sin- 

 gle embryo. The cocoon is thin, and made 

 of a leathery, tough material, with a very 

 distinct stalk-like process at each end. It 

 contains a milky fluid like that found in the 

 body cavity of the worm. 



Fishing in the Greek Islands. — Mr. J. 



Theodore Bent has been struck, in his visits 

 among the islands of Greece, by the obser- 

 vation of many survivals of ancient ways 

 in the customs of the people, and this very 

 noticeably in the fishing. In fishing for 

 " shell-fish," the fishermen use a long tri- 

 dent, with more prongs than Neptune's 

 had, but otherwise like it, and which they 

 call by the old name /ca^uaf . The fishermen 

 of Hydra make bulwarks of netted osiers, 

 like those which Ulysses made for his two- 

 decked raft when he left Calypso's charmed 

 island. The scaros is pursued in the way 

 that Oppian sings of in his poem on fishing. 

 Taking advantage of the affectionate charac- 

 ter of the scaros and of the male's gallant 

 devotion to the female, the fisherman fast- 

 ens a female fish to his line. If the " bait " 

 is dead, he imitates life by bobbing it up 

 and down. The male scari rush up in 

 shoals to rescue their female fellow, and are 

 caught by a companion-fisher with a net. 

 For tunny, nets are used having large open- 

 ings and furnished with a thick string. A 

 bay is chosen with a convenient promon- 

 tory, from a post on which the nets are fast- 

 ened, while the fishermen row out to a rock 

 in the sea. Here they leave a man, and re- 



turn to shore by a roundabout route, carry- 

 ing a string with them by which they can 

 pull in the net as soon as the man on the 

 rock announces the arrival of the fish. The 

 same method is described by Aristotle in his 

 book on animals. If the market is over- 

 stocked with tunny, the fish are driven into 

 a creek by throwing stones at them and the 

 entrance is fastened up with brambles. The 

 fishermen in Melos believe in an ogre 

 called Vanis, a being with goat's feet and a 

 human body — a satyr, in short — who dwells 

 at the end of a promontory they have to 

 pass in going out of their harbor. They 

 always cast a bit of bread into the water as 

 they go by, that Vanis may eat it and send 

 them fish in return. 



Studies at Wnndt's Psychological Lab- 

 oratory. — Wundt's psychological laboratory 

 at Leipsic occupies four rooms in the uni- 

 versity building. The number of students 

 has gradually increased, and in 1887 was 

 nineteen. The men work in groups, one act- 

 ing as subject in the experiments, and an- 

 other making observations. Wundt suggests 

 subjects for research at the beginning of 

 the semester, but he lets the students choose 

 the direction in which they prefer to work, 

 and encourages them to find independently 

 problems and the methods of solving them. 

 The experiments are classified by Dr. J. Mck. 

 Cattell under four heads : 1. The Analysis 

 and Measurement of Sensation. 2. The 

 Duration of Mental Processes. 3. The Time 

 Sense ; and 4. Attention, Memory, and the 

 Association of Ideas. Under the first head 

 are included experiments in the least differ- 

 ences in weight, intensity, and tone of sound, 

 illumination, and color that can be perceived 

 — the whole being embraced under the term 

 psychophysies. In the subjects under the 

 second head, constituting psychometry — 

 " the facts obtained when we learn how 

 long it takes to perceive, to will, to remem- 

 ber, etc., are in themselves of the same in- 

 terest to the psychologist, as the distances 

 of the stars to the astronomer or atomic 

 weights to the chemist " ; they help in the 

 analysis of complex mental phenomena, and 

 in studying the nature of attention, volition, 

 etc. Psychometrical experiment has brought 

 perhaps the strongest testimony we have to 

 the complete parallelism of physical and 



