440 
POPULAR SCIENCE REVIEW. 
indifference as regards their capacity for either mental or bodily work, there 
is a general conviction that food requires to be taken, or at least that a 
pretence of taking it must be made. Plants had long shown that they 
should have food in abundance, and in a condition in which they could easily 
make use of it. Of this he gave several instances. He then proceeded to 
give causes showing the necessity for supplying plants with food. The 
same applied to many persons who had never applied their intelligence to 
the selection of their food or the method of taking it. He believed there 
were few social problems of more importance than how we should acquaint 
the wife of the labourer, the artisan — nay, even the wives or servants of the 
middle class — how they should expend a fair share of their income upon 
food to the greatest advantage, and how they should prepare that food when 
they had purchased it without destroying its nutritive qualities. One or 
two instances will make his meaning perfectly plain. A savoury dish of 
meat (very common in some districts) is prepared by mincing or cutting into 
small more or less cubical blocks. This is then stewed, or more frequently 
boiled ; the outer surface of each little block has its albumen firmly coagu- 
lated, and the whole is converted into about as indigestible a mess as can 
well be imagined, the high-priced and highly nutritious meat having been 
destroyed. 
Small Size of the Brain in Tertiary Mammals. — At the last meeting of the 
Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, June 17th, Prof. Marsh, of Yale 
College, made a communication on the size of the brain in Tertiary mam- 
mals. His researches on this subject have been mainly confined to the 
larger extinct mammals which he had obtained in the Pocky Mountain re- 
gion, and the results are of peculiar interest. The Eocene mammals all 
appear to have had small brains, and in some of them the brain cavity was 
hardly more capacious than in the higher reptiles. The largest Eocene 
mammals are the Dinocerata , which were but little inferior to the elephant 
in bulk. In Dinoceras (Marsh), the type genus, the brain cavity is not more 
than one-eighth the average size of that in .existing rhinoceroses. In the 
other genera of this order, Tionceras (Marsh) and Unitatherium (Leidy), the 
smallness of the brain was quite remarkable. The gigantic mammals of the 
American Miocene are the Brontotheridce, which equalled the Dinocerata in 
size. In Brontotherium (Marsh), the only genus of the family in which the 
skull is known, the brain cavity is very much larger than in the Eocene 
Dinoceras , being about the size of the brain in the Indian rhinoceros. In 
the Pliocene strata of the West, a species of mastodon is the largest mam- 
mal; and although but little superior in absolute size to Brontotherium, it 
had a very much larger brain, but not equal to that of existing Probosci- 
dians. The tapiroid ungulates of the Eocene had small brain cavities, 
much smaller than their allies, the Miocene Bhinocertodice. The Pliocene 
representatives of the latter group had well developed brains, but propor- 
tionally smaller than living species. A similar progression in brain capacity 
seems to be well marked in the equine mammals, especially from the Eocene 
Orohippus, through Miohippus and Anchitherium of the Miocene, Pliohippus 
and Hipparion of the Pliocene, to the recent Equus. In other groups of 
mammals, likewise, so far as observed, the size of the brain shows a corres- 
ponding increase in the successive subdivisions of the Tertiary. These facts 
