NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY. 247 
inata, with the posterior fleshy attachments that contained the 
essential virus. I examined the cavity of the pelvic bones, with- 
out any peculiar result, and at last detached all except the hard, 
muscular pouches and the common fundamental aperture. These I 
carefully cut loose, and thus reduced the formidable animal to the 
last and least parts possible, and they seemed totally inadequate to 
explain the well known effect this animal produces. I next boldly 
severed, longitudinally, the rectum and anus; nothing was to be 
seen worthy of remark, except two teat-like projections in two 
volcanic or crater-like cavities that seemed suggestive of what 
might happen. So I cut away all the remaining superfluous parts, 
and at last had the anal lips, two muscular pouches, and several 
small glands connected with them. My fortitude here giving out, 
and it growing dark, I adjourned the matter to the next day. 
hen I resumed operations, on the parts now weighing only 
about two ounces out of a Mephitis of nine pounds, I had a strip 
of skin with the anal lips, the suspicious calices or cones in 
their cup-like cavities, and the pouches. Microse scope was at 
hand, magnifying glasses, spectacles, and dissecting case that had 
done much human duty. I began by severing the two muscular 
pouches, and found no connection between them. Books say, 
“The animal gives its peculiar and penetrating odor from two 
glands, situated external to the pelvis.” I found the ‘ glands” to 
be clear muscular fibre, with not a particle of smell, or a trace of 
any glandular structure. So much truth there is in old sayings, 
repeated for years or ages past! Further to test the matter, I cut 
slowly to the middle of the mass of muscular, not glandular, 
fibres, and came upon a thick, white, leathery capsule, like the 
crop of a chicken, with the source for the contents, provided by 
the little glands about it. Now putting on old clothes, and sit- 
ting to the windward, I cut through this white capsule; a bright 
yellow fluid came out, and I instantly felt that ‘distance would 
lend enchantment to the view.” But I was not to be baffled. So 
I dipped the point of my scalpel in the yellow fluid, put the tenth 
or twentieth of a drop of it on a glass, covered it with another 
strip of glass, and placed it under a power of forty diameters in 
my microscope. The appearance was peculiar. It looked like 
molten gold, or like quicksilver of the finest golden color. Pres- 
sure on the strips of glass made it flow like — of melted 
gold. 
By a power of sixty diameters the same color still appeared, 
