Reptiles. 



7819 



sills, whither his coming is presently made known throughout the house by the noisy 

 strokes of his beak against the woodwork,— aye, and against the glass itself, — if his 

 presence and his wants are inadvertently overlooked too long. Rock-pigeons haunt 

 many of the caves around our coast ; and the sweet " cushat " is " at home " wherever 

 she can find trees enough to shelter her. The grouse has but recently become extinct 

 on our hills, where the plover and the curlew still find some security in their com- 

 parative insignificance. The heron, here miscalled the crane, is a regular visitor. 

 The little jack snipe is not nearly so common as is its larger brother. Woodcocks 

 abound in a hard winter: they know full well how short and slight our frosts are, and 

 never fail to remember "something" so much "to their advantage," the cunning 

 long-bills! about the shortest day of last year it was no uncommon thing for a single 

 gun to bag from six to ten couple. But decidedly the most prominent members of the 

 ornithological beau monde here are the cuckoo and corn-crake, companions in arrival 

 (they announced themselves respectively May 4th and 5th this year), they are mates 

 both in song and in silence: "in song," I repeat, for songsters they both are right 

 pleasant to my ear: how merrily their calls ring over our treeless hill-sides here all 

 day, and all night too, where the " no real nigfht " of the almanacs is a patent reality ! 

 The cuckoo may perhaps snatch a cmple of hours' " snooze," but let the midnight 

 hours be only calm and mild, and the corn-crake never closes an eye in sleep : the 

 cuckoo loiters longest with us, haunting the sand-hills of the north far into the 

 autumn' months. — Hugh A. Slowell; Christ Church, Manghold, Isle of Man, 

 December 12, 1861. 



The Heart surviving the Body, and the Body surviving the Heart. — Dr. Harley, in 

 his introductory address at University College, made some observations on these 

 extraordinary subjects which seem to have excited general interest. Having been 

 applied to by a naturalist to explain more fully and more publicly his views, Dr. 

 Harley has supplied the following particulars, from which it appears that both the 

 phenomena are brought about through the agency of poisons: — "The two poisons to 

 which I alluded in my address at University College, which enable the physiologist 

 to produce the wonderful sight of a dead body with a living heart, as well as of a dead 

 heart in a living body, are curiously enough the preparations of savages in the oppo- 

 site hemispheres of our i;h>be, and are employed by them for similar purposes, namely, 

 the making of poisoned arrows and other weapons. One of the poisons, woorara, is 

 prepared and employed by the natives of Guiana, and is so powerful that it requires 

 but a very small quantity to penetrate a wound in order to produce a fatal result. At 

 one time, indeed, it was said to be destructive not only to animal but even to vege- 

 table life, and that if a poisoned arrow chanced to penetrate the bark of a tree the 

 tree soon drooped and died. Although this is a' gross exaggeration of its poisonous 

 properties, it is nevertheless true that it requires but a very small quantity of woorara 

 to take away the life of an animal. I have myself seen a dog killed in the short 

 space of sixty seconds, with somewhat less than a grain of the poison introduced into 

 a vein. Woorara possesses some properties entirely distinct from any poisonous 

 agent, if we except conia, the preparation of which is known to civilized man ; for, 

 notwithstanding its virulence, the physiologist has it in his power to administer it so 

 as to paralyse; the motor nerves, and render the limbs flaccid as in death without de- 

 stroying the intelligence of the animal. Its action on the heart I have already 

 VOL. XX. E 



