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POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
succinic, camphoric, &c., acids. (2) There is no loss at the positive pole ; the 
loss is only experienced at the negative pole, since half of the electrolysed 
acid is regenerated in the other compartment. (3) The two compartments 
become simultaneously poorer ; this occurs with lactic, tartaric, citric, and, 
in general, all the very readily oxidisable acids. 
ZOOLOGY AND COMPARATIVE 1 ANATOMY. 
The Anatomy of the Skunk . — Dr. J. S. Parker, in a paper published in the 
“American Naturalist,” says, in regard to the glands which secrete the 
well-known odour emitted by this animal: “When I resumed operations, 
on the parts now weighing only about two ounces out of a Mephitis of nine 
pounds, I had a strip of skin with the anal lips, the suspicious calices or 
cones in their cup-like cavities, and the pouches. Microscope was at hand, 
magnifying glasses, spectacles, and dissecting case that had done much human 
duty. I began by severing the two muscular pouches, and found no con- 
nection between them. Books say, 1 The animal gives its peculiar and 
penetrating odour from two glands, situated external to the pelvis.’ I found 
the 1 glands ’ to be clear muscular fibre , with not a particle of smell, or a 
trace of any glandular structure. So much truth there is in old sayings, re- 
peated for years or ages past ! Further to test the matter, I cut slowly to 
the middle of the mass of muscular, not glandular, fibres, and came upon a 
thick, white, Teathery capsule, like the crop of a chicken, with the source 
for the contents, provided by the little glands about it. Now putting on 
old clothes, and sitting to the windward, I cut through this white capsule ; 
a bright yellow fluid came out, and I instantly felt that distance would 
‘lend enchantment to the view.’ But I was not to be baffled. So I 
dipped the point of my scalpel in the yellow fluid, put the tenth or twentieth 
of a drop of it on a glass, covered it with another strip of glass, and placed it 
under a power of forty diameters in my microscope. The appearance was 
peculiar. It looked like molten gold, or like quicksilver of the finest golden 
colour. Pressure on the strips of glass made it flow like globules of melted 
gold.” 
The Anatomy of the Fin Whale . — This was a paper read before the British 
Association at Edinburgh by Professor Struthers. The author set out by 
stating that the whale in question, which measured 68 feet in length, was 
found in the North Sea, some thirty or forty miles off* Aberdeen. On its 
being towed into Peterhead, he proceeded to examine it, and its plaited 
breast at once showed it to be one of the rorquals. The colour was white on 
the belly, dark on the sides, and black on the back. In examining the 
bones and muscles, he found a sixteenth pair of ribs. The position of these 
was a remarkable one for a rib to occupy in a mammalian animal, suggesting 
a sternal rather than a vertebral rib, and somewhat resembling the abnormal 
ribs of the crocodile. The muscles he spoke of as rudimentary structures, 
whose function was not distinct, but low. As abnormal or unusual rudi- 
mentary structures could be understood only through variability and inheri- 
tance, so normal rudimentary structures were to be explained, not by the 
fictions of final cause, or of so-called type, but by the law of inheritance and 
