NATURAL HISTORY NOTES, QUERIES, &c. 19/ 
green star and help to make a dish of perfume. What are the dwarf geraniums, 
the ‘ stocky ’ calceolarias, the begonias, the hardy bedding lobelias, to us, when 
we may bend over the purple earth, and in imagination hear the bursting of the 
seed-pods she has stored for us? when we know that in February the assembly of 
the bright army will begin with the first yellow aconite mocking a pale sun, that 
onward with squillas, grape hyacinth, ‘sweet Nancies,’ hepaticas, and ‘ peacock- 
eyes,’ all our old friends will glow and blossom for us in the places we first learned 
to look for them, and that the last private in the last company will be a belated 
bud upon the Gloire de Dijon when November is darkening to its last day ? No, 
the wide earth holds nothing that we would exchange for the English flowers of 
our English home .” — Daily Chronicle, August 24th. 
NATURAL HISTORY NOTES AND QUERIES. 
The Queen Cow’s Crown. — The following is from a letter of the late 
James Macdonell, written at Dietenheim in the Austrian Tyrol in 1878, and 
published in the account of his life by W. R. Nicoll (p. 346) “ The first thing 
we saw was the crown which is placed on the queen cow when she and the rest 
of the herd come down from the autumn pastures among the hills. The cattle are 
kept far up among the mountains during the summer. One of them is called the 
queen, and, unlike our own sovereign, she gets the place by a vigorous system of 
competitive examination. After much fighting, one of the cows takes the head 
of all the others, going first into every new place, and first out of it. That vigorous 
creature is the queen. When she comes down she has the honour of wearing the 
wondrous crown which we saw last night. It is made of a multitude of pieces of 
coloured glass, some of it spun into long fibres like hair, some of it cast into 
pearl-like beads, some of it into red beads and green, until it is a blaze of colour. 
In the centre is a wax figure of St. Anthony. The queen cow is said to be as proud 
of her crown as other queens are of theirs.” 
A Death’s Head, Moth at Hampstead. — It may interest some readers 
to know that a perfect and beautiful specimen of Acherontia Atropos, the Death’s- 
head Hawk Moth, was found in the Elierdale Road, Hampstead, on August 24th, 
by my workman : this is the first specimen that I remember having seen taken in 
the town of Hampstead. When living at Ashford, Kent, many years ago, I 
remember finding several of the caterpillar, the season being ver}’ warm through- 
out August and September of that year. 
J. E. Whiti.ng. 
A Strawberry Festival. — We clip the following from a paper on “The 
Clift Dwellers in the Canon,” published in the September number of the Atlantic 
Monthly : — “As I lingered to admire the picturesque rapids in the brook, a 
slight movement drew my attention to a little projection on a stone not six feet 
from me, where a small chipmuck sat pertly up, holding in his two hands and 
eagerly nibbling— was it, could it be, a strawberry, in this rocky place ? Of course I 
stopped instantly to look at this pretty sight. I judged him to be a youngster, 
partly because of his evident fearlessness of his hereditary enemy a human being ; 
more on account of the saucy way in which he returned my stare ; and most, 
perhaps, from the appearance of absorbing delight, in which there was a suggestion 
of the unexpected, with which he discussed that sweet morsel. Closely I watched 
him as he turned the treasure round and round in his deft little paws, and at last 
dropped the rifled hull. Would he go for another, and where ? In an instant, 
with a parting glance at me to make sure that I had not moved, he scrambled 
down his rocky throne, and bounded in great leaps over the path to a crumpled 
paper, which I saw at once was one of the bags with which tourists sow the earth. 
But its presence there did not arouse in my furry friend the indignation it excited in 
me. To him it was a treasure-trove, for into it he disappeared without a moment’s 
hesitation ; and almost before I had jumped to the conclusion that it contained 
the remains of somebody’s luncheon he reappeared, holding in his mouth another 
strawberry, bounded over the ground to his former seat, and proceeded to dispose 
of that one also. The scene was so charming and his pleasure so genuine, that 
