104 NATURAL HISTORY MISCELLANY. 
it acts very well, but not with others. Much depends on the mode of 
doing it. It should be done gradually, and with an iron not too hot. 
My friend told me that he had taken nearly two hours in thus drying a 
plant, but he found himself well rewarded. , I have Orchis fusca now 
that I ironed out in 1863, and it has lost very little of its colour. Oph- 
rys muscifera looks well ironed; so do grasses.” — Henry Utlyett. Hard- 
wicke’s Scientific Gossip, Aug. 1, 1866. 
———-*«>o— 
ZOOLOGY. 
FLIGHTS or Butrrerriies.—In Europe, we have had notices of re- 
markable flights of swarms of butterflies; but Sir Emerson Tennent, in 
his work on the Natural History of Gaston, has related ie instan- 
ces of “flights of these delicate = ea generally of aw 
* yellow hue, apparently miles re: and of such Prodigio ex- 
tension as to occupy hours and even i, uninterruptedly in their 
passage” :— 
migrations, in Ceylon, were mostly Cal- . 
ck Marie, C. Alemeone and C. napig with straggling individuals of the genus Zup- 
oras and £. Their 
iiaa direction. A friend of mine travelling from Kandy to Kornegalle, drove 
for nine miles through a cloud of white butterflies, which were passing across the road by 
he went.” p. 
: ero 
GEOLOGY. 
Tue First remem OF MAN ON OUR PLaNET.—‘‘Although per- 
haps more interesting in arnbaii ix than in a geological point of 
view, we cannot altogether exclude from our notice the phenomena ~ 
attending the first appearance of Man on our planet. The discoveries 
of the last few years have cee shown that the opinions for- 
merly entertained of a great break existing between the period when 
the now extinct races of Mammalia dwelt in our land, and the first cre- 
ation of man, are no longer tenable. Here also we have been obliged 
to give up the sariga of great bre as hetwecii Successive fo formations. 
