1885.] 
Notes . 
375 
The “ Alnwick Herald ” asserts that a boy of 10 years of age, 
after being ill for three months, vomited a full-grown newt, and 
thereon completely recovered. 
[We once incurred much obloquy for our want of faith in the 
story that a sickly girl had vomited a lively green lizard, Lacerta 
ogilis, which was said to have immediately run away into a 
hedge.] 
Mr. E. Bordoe, in a paper on “ Browning as a Scientific 
Poet,” said that, in the poem “ Easter Day,” Browning seemed 
to have anticipated by five years Herbert Spencer’s theory of the 
evolution of the first rudiments of nerves in Medusce along the 
lines of least resistance. 
Two very prominent official savants will doubtless have re- 
signed their appointments before this is in the hands of our 
readers. 
Prof. 0 . Marsh proves that there has been a general relative 
increase in the size of the brain in mammals, birds, and reptiles 
from the Jurassic to the present time. 
Some interesting cases of hermaphroditism in the human 
subjedt are being discussed in the medical papers. 
In a paper on deaf-mutism an eminent religious organ asserts 
that all deaf-mutes are found to be entirely devoid of the God- 
idea, — in other words, natural atheists. 
H. Traube (“ Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogie ”) has discovered 
a large mass of jade in the Zobtengebirge, near Jordansmuhl, in 
Silesia. This observation is of great anthropological im- 
portance. 
Dr. de Watteville, writing in the “ Lancet,” gives an account 
of the successful treatment of two cases of “ writers’ cramp,” 
by Mr. Wolff, of Upper Berkeley Street. The agencies used 
were massage and Swedish gymnastics. 
Mr. S. H. Scudder (“Science”) contends that no “ordinal 
differentiation ” can be traced in palaeozoic insecfts, though all 
the existing orders were fully developed by the middle of the 
Mesozoic period. 
Dr. Baur, in the same journal, mentions the exceptional oc- 
currence of a rudimentary second cartilaginous phalanx in the 
third finger of the wing of an embryonic duck. 
The mean duration of life in Bengal is 52*88 years as against 
40*86 in England. Taking insanity, blindness, deaf-mutism, and 
leprosy together, the number of persons affecffed is in Bengal 
3*8 per cent, whilst in England, though we have no leprosy, it is 
4*49 per cent. 
