( 602 ) 
[September, 
NOTES. 
The Birmingham Philosophical Society has established a fund 
for the endowment of research. Mr. Darwin has contributed £25. 
The French Government has assigned to M. Pasteur the sum 
of 50,000 francs, to assist him in conducting his important re- 
searches on the contagious diseases of domestic animals. 
M. Pasteur has communicated to the Academy of Sciences a 
memoir on the Etiology of Cattle-plague. He concludes that 
the germs of the peculiar baCteria which cause the disease, and 
which are of course present in the carcases of the animals which 
have perished, are brought to the surface of the earth by the 
agency of earth-worms. Hence he recommends that animals 
which die of “ zymotic ” disease should be buried in poor, 
chalky, or sandy soils, where earth-worms are rare. (Might not 
similar precautions be useful in disposing of the bodies of human 
beings who have died of pestilential diseases ?) 
M. Max Cornu has observed the alternation of generations in 
the parasitic Fungi known as Uredineas. 
M. Vaillant has made a series of observations on the repro- 
duction of Pleurodeles Waltlii. 
M. N. Poletaien has demonstrated the existence of salivary 
glands in the Neuroptera, the existence of which had been long 
denied. 
M. C. Richet, in a paper communicated to the Academy cf 
Sciences, gives an account of the aCtion of strychnine upon the 
Mammalia. Under the influence of artificial respiration very 
large doses of strychine can be supported without the production 
of immediate death, and the phenomena produced differ deci- 
dedly from those observed after the ingestion of small doses. 
In very large quantities the poison aCts somewhat like curare 
and somewhat like chloral. 
“ Vivisection . — The attentive reader of ephemeral literature 
cannot fail to be struck by the rapidly increasing number of 
journalists who weekly inveigh against the horrors of vivisection. 
It may be that the anti-viviseCtion fanatics are blameable for the 
excitation of popular indignation against a practice of which 
those most ignorant of physiological investigations consider 
themselves well able to be judges. The utter nonsense which 
greets the eye almost daily, and even in papers well informed on 
most ordinary subjects, though it receives a merited contempt 
