246 
Notes. 
[April, 
Belgium 14,000 paupers, 150 lunatics, and 10 suicides.— Berliner 
Tageblatt. 
At a meeting of the Academy of Medicine in Ireland the Rev. 
Dr Haughton stated that the “ nail-biting habit was, in his ex- 
perience, confined to men.” About twelve years ago we had the 
opportunity of observing a woman, of about 27 years old who 
bit her nails viciously. We learn, from mistresses of schools, 
that the habit is by no means rare among female children. 
With the mere “ passage of matter through matter we are 
all fairly familar, but the alleged passage of a solid through a 
solid without any breach of continuity having been occasioned 
cuts away the very ground from under our feet. 
Mr. James Davison (“Journal of Anat. arid Physio!.”) con- 
cludes from a series of observations, that full light, darkness, 
and the blue ray have no influence on the hatching of the eggs 
of the blowfly. Pupation ensued in the dark in fourteen days, 
in full light in twenty-one to twenty-eight days, and in the blue 
rav not at all. The mature inserts appeared in the light in 
twenty-three days, but in the dark only in twenty-six days The 
specimens reared in the dark were smaller and less highly co- 
loured than those reared in the light. An increase ot 21 F. 
accelerated both the hatching of the eggs and the pupation of 
the larvae. 
Mr H H. Nicholson (“ Science ”) has observed that certain 
snakes (Pituophis Sayi), on receiving the shock of an indurtion- 
coil, uttered a cry like that of a young puppy. 
The following strange passage is said to have recently been 
printed in an English medical journal, as from a correspondent: 
a When I state that after the death of a dog or person who 
has been bitten by a poison snake, on post-mortem examination 
there will be found attached to the liver a snake of the same 
species as the one that bit the dog or person, and if the dog has 
been bitten twice there will be two snakes, and in one instance 
the snake put out its tongue, nobody who has never seen it or 
' heard of it will believe it. Yet such is the fart, rtns is why a 
nerson or dog who has been bitten with a snake feels the influence 
every year at the time snakes awake up from their dormant 
state.” 
“ LRht” writes : — “ So eminent a man and moralist as Dr. 
Johnson was touched by Queen Anne,”—*.*., as a remedy for 
scrofula. But he was not cuied ! 
Madame Traube-Mengarini (“ Du Bois Reymond’s Archiv.”) 
has been studying the functions of the brain of fishes. Not the 
