532 General Notes. | [July, 
ance they generally favor their larger parent. The cross between 
the brook trout and California salmon and the salmon trout and 
brook trout bid fair to be fine fish. Those now in the hatchery 
are eight incheslong. It is to be hoped that further careful experi- 
ments may be made to ascertain whether these hybrids are fertile, 
and can produce fertile offspring. Apropos of fertile hybrids 
certain journals have stated that a mule in Paris has had six 
young, from a horse, ass and a zebra. Mr. C. C. Lobingier, of 
Allegheny county, Pennsylvania, states in the American Agricul- 
turist, for May, that the copperhead snake swallows its young; 
that he took out thirty-four young from three and a half to six 
inches long from four old ones. In the April number of the 
same paper it is claimed that rattlesnakes swallow their young. 
Compare the NATURALIST for May, 1868 (vol. 11, p. 133). e 
report on the Florida Reefs, by Louis Agassiz, is reprinted in the 
Memoirs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, vol. vu, with 
the addition of twenty-one beautiful plates, illustrative of the reef- 
building corals, and an additional plate of the coralline plants. 
Dr. Harrison Allen’ figures and describes a foetal walrus in 
the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadel- 
phia. Dr. Evarts describes in the American Monthly Micro- 
scopical Fournal a new species of Ophrydium (O. ade), and Prof. 
D. S. Kellicott gives an account of a new Argulus (A. stzzostethit). 
New Diptera are described by Mr. S. W. Williston, in the 
Transactions of the Connecticut Academy.——An Englishman's 
notions about the English sparrow are given in Mr. R. McLach- 
lan’s address to the members of the West Kent Natural History, 
Microscopical and Photographic Society; he concludes: “ If the 
advantages of living in a free country have not so far intensified, 
in America, the ultra-radical proclivities of our sparrow, as to have 
eliminated from his nature those certainly good qualities he pos- 
sesses here, I venture to predict our generous kinsmen on the 
other side of the Atlantic will end by tolerating him, and, proba- 
bly, by an inward conviction that the adsence of our sparrow would 
leave with them, as with us,a blank impossible to fill up.” ——The 
marine invertebrates of Vancouver and the Queen Charlottes 
islands, coast of British Columbia, have been investigated by Mr. 
G. M. Dawson, and the species enumerated by Mr. J. F. Whiteaves, 
with descriptions of new forms by Profs. Verrill and Smith. As 
a further contribution to the subject of insect-destroying fungi 
may be cited a short article in the Comptes rendus, by MM. Brong- 
niart and Cornu on an epidemic among Syrphus flies caused by a 
fungus (Entomophthora). A new illustrated work on the 
Pediculi, by E. Piaget, to form two quarto volumes, is announced 
to be published at Leyden, by E. J. Brill, who desires subscriptions. 
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