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The Museum Gazette 



to colder regions. Water also is mobile ; and though it receives and 

 stores up a great deal of heat, it is for ever dispersing it over the 

 earth. The rain, which brings down a certain portion of heat from 

 the atmosphere or absorbs it from the earth on which it falls, flows 

 away in streams to the ocean ; while the ocean itself, constantly 

 impelled by the winds, forms great currents, which carry off the sur- 

 plus heated water of the tropics to the temperate and even to the 

 Polar regions. An immense quantity of sun-heat is also used up in 

 evaporating water, and the vapour is conveyed by the aerial currents 

 to distant countries, where, on being condensed into rain, it gives up 

 much of this heat to the earth and atmosphere. The power of water 

 in carrying away heat is well seen in the abnormally high tempera- 

 ture of arid deserts, while the still more powerful influence of air can 

 be best understood by considering how rapidly a few hours of our 

 northern sunshine will heat a tightly-closed glasshouse far above the 

 temperature produced even by the vertical sun of the equator where 

 the air is free to circulate. VYe can quite understand, then, that, were 

 not a very large proportion of the sun's heat carried away from the 

 tropics by air and water, those parts of the earth would be uninhabit- 

 able furnaces, as would indeed any part of the earth where the sun 

 shone brightly throughout a summer's day." 



X. L. asks : What is the difference, if any, between a spore and a 

 cell? 



The reply- must be that all spores are cells, but not all cells are 

 spores. A spore is a cell with very special endowments. It 

 approaches a seed in its capabilities of reproducing its kind. It is 

 the fruiting of a fungus, and will, if the conditions are favourable, 

 produce another fungus. It is not, however, a true seed, since no 

 sexual combination of substances has preceded its formation, and it 

 contains no embryo. 



Nyanza. — The Bechuanas are Kaffirs, not Hottentots, or perhaps 

 in more scientific language, they are of the Bantu family. 



Pritchard, in his History of Man, figures a Bushman's skull, 

 p. 312. It is decidedly dolichocephalic. 



Greek Church. — H. A. W., in his article on Lapland in the 

 E?tcydoft(zdia Britannica, writes : " Not to mention the advantage 

 which the fisher has over the reindeer-keeper in connection with the 

 many parts of the Greek Church." But really he has no advantage, 

 for the Greek Church on its fasts forbids fish as well as flesh. 



In Scandinavia the Lapps are protestants, in Russia they belong to 

 the Greek Church. The facts have some importance in reference to 

 the leprosy question. That disease does not prevail as a rule in the 

 Greek Church population. 



