620 General Notes. (June, 
formed in the latter soon take on an excessive development and 
in very few eggs which are allowed to remain unmoved during 
the whole period of incubation does the body cavity of the em- 
bryo become closed in. The cause of death in the unmoved eggs 
is, according to Dareste, the union by growth of the allantois 
with the egg-yolk which latter is thus prevented from becoming 
finally absorbed into the alimentary canal preliminary to the clos- 
ure of the body cavity. These adhesions of the allantois with 
the vitelline membrane lead to frequent rupture of the latter 
whose contents are thus largely lost to the embryo. Death of 
the chick in the unturned eggs usually occurs about the second 
week of incubation. When the eggs are turned over it is proba- 
ble that the position of the allantois upon the. yolk is shifted and 
this daily movement prevents adhesion between the two surfaces. 
Sixteen eggs were placed under the same conditions of artificial 
incubation, but eight were allowed to remain unmoved while the 
eight remaining were turned over twice a day. In the first set 
absorption of the yolk did not occur in any specimen, and all the 
embryos died in the course of the second or third week. In the 
second set, in six eggs the yolk was absorbed in the normal man- 
ner ; in a seventh, opened on the twenty-second day, the chick was 
alive and hearty and the yolk was being absorbed; in the eighth 
egg the chick was dead on the twentieth day and adhesion be- 
tween the allantois and yolk had prevented absorption of the lat- 
ter.— Comptes Rendus, 1884, p. 813. 
PSYCHOLOGY. 
PsycHIcAL REsEARCH.—At the Birmingham Midland Institute 
in November last, Mr. W. H. Myers, M.A., gave a lecture on 
“ Aims and Methods of Psychical Research.” The lecturer began 
by dwelling on the difficulty which the religious and scientific 
world experience in finding a common ground on which to meet, 
and pointed out that neither party had made a serious attempt to 
test the real value of those scattered indications of a psychical 
element in man which actual experience offers us. He explained 
that the object of the Society for Psychical Research was to sub- 
ject all these indications to a fair and unbiased examination on 
scientific lines. The experiments which had so far been tried 
consisted mainly in discovering persons of special sensitiveness, 
and subjecting them to certain influences, either of magnets, &c. 
(as in the experiments of Reichenbach, of Charcot), or hypnotic 
or mesmeric passes, or of mere expectant attention, this last pos- 
sibly inducing some influence at present unknown, as in so-called 
spiritualistic séances. In the lecturer’s view it was at present 
wholly premature to ascribe the last phenomena to the spirits of 
: the dead. Whatever in them was not due to mere fraud, must 
- wait for an explanation until the simpler phenomena connected 
: with sensitives were much better understood. The lecturer then 
