Notes. 
1884.] 
693 
. ^he “ Graphic ” thinks that for one person who feels any 
interest in the proceedings of the British Association a hundred 
will carefully read over the reports of the late “ Church Con- 
giess. . . This is an unadvised utterance. The proceedings of 
the British Association will be carefully summarised and criticised 
in Germany, Italy, Belgium, France, &c,, when no one outside 
of stridtly clerical circles will even think of the Church Con- 
gress. 
. According to Mr. J. B. Haycraft (“ Proc. Royal Soc.”) leeches, 
in biting, injedt into the blood a liquid which destroys the natural • 
coagulative power of the blood. 
Prof. E. D. Cope read an exceedingly interesting memoir on 
Catagenesis before the Biological Sedtion of the American 
Association. 
“ Science protests emphatically against the manner in 
which the law allowing American colleges the right to import 
foreign scientific periodicals duty free is nullified by the Customs 
officials. ^ 
I he crayfish ( Astacus jiuviatilis) is becoming scarce in 
France, owing to an epidemic occasioned by a parasitic fungus, 
Mycosis astacina. 
Mr. W. Brewster (“ Proceedings of the Boston Natural 
History Society”) mentions the curious fadt that the kittiwake 
drinks salt water readily, but cannot be induced to taste fresh 
water. 
At a late conference of homoeopathists the President stated 
that his fraternity “ raise no objection to the germ theory,” 
but assert “ that it affords no help whatever in the cure of 
disease ! ” 
In the “ American Naturalist ” we find the following exag- 
gerated didtum : — “ Mr. Romanes, like most of his countrymen, 
is a devout and blind follower of Darwin, and, like most dis- 
ciples, carries out his special theory of Natural Selection with 
more of dogmatism and unwavering trust than his master.” 
According to French contemporaries the phrenologists, phy- 
siognomists, and graphiologists are confronted by a new body of 
rivals, the pilographists, who profess to judge a man’s charadter 
by his beard. 
The necessity for eliminating the “ Economical Sedtion ” of 
the British Association was never so fully manifested as at the 
late Montreal meeting. 
The Sedlion of “ Mechanical Science,” too, was guilty of 
something very like a trespass into political regions. Such 
