THE MEDITERRANEAN NATURALIST 
233 
“Shotts” of Algeria M. Vuillot observes that 
there are several districts between Sif-El- 
Ashana and El-Awina that are situated 
above the sea-level. 
This is of special interest as Commander 
Eoudaire has stated that the whole of this 
reo-ion lies below sea level. 
© 
Some of the effects of the absence of 
light upon animal life were strikingly re- 
vealed, not long ago, on the reopening of 
an old mine near Bangor, Cal. In a dry 
slope connecting two shafts, one of the ex- 
plorers was astonished and startled to find 
a number of flies that were perfectly white, 
except the eyes, which were red; and di- 
rectly afterward he killed a pure, white 
rattlesnake. The animals had lived in the 
dry passages, where the} r had been supplied 
with air but not w T ith light. It is supposed 
that the flies were the offspring of some that 
had been imprisoned by the partial filling 
of the mine with water about thirty years 
ago, and that the snake, when quite young, 
had been washed down in a rain. A few 
of the flies were exposed to light in a glass 
case, and resumed the colors of ordinary 
house flies within a week. 
Acc'rdino- to statistics recently collected 
© . . . , 
by tie. German Forestry Commission the 
maximum of life attained by the most com- 
mon of the forest trees is thus given. The 
pine-tree is assigned from 500 to 700 years, 
the silver fir about 425 years, the larch 275 
years, the red-birch 245 years, the birch 
200 years, the ash 170 years, the alder 145 
years, and the elm 130 years. 
The curious oi'gans of the throat known 
as the tonsils — whose function has been a 
source of much perplexity — are believed by 
Dr. Lovell Gulland to be glands in which 
the white corpuscles are formed. It is these 
corpuscles that are constantly at war with 
disease germs in the blood. Some of the 
white corpuscles, if Dr. Gulland’s novel 
theory be true, are stationed as sanitary 
sentinels to guard the entrance to the 
throat, lungs and stomach, while the corpu- 
scles circulating in the blood act as an army 
to attack the germs that succeed in entering 
the body. Another physician contends that 
the vermiform appendix, apparently useless 
organ and one that often gives serious and 
fatal trouble, is also a gland, and that it 
acts as an intestinal tonsil. 
The experiments that have hitherto been 
made for the purpose of ascertaining the 
speed of fishes have not been attended with 
very satisfactory results. The comparati- 
vely low intelligence of this class of animals 
makes it difficult to direct them. They 
rarely swim in anything approaching to a 
straight line, and experiments upon them 
give only approximate results. Pike in 
pursuit of their prey seem to dash through 
the water, and salmon and trout move 
almost as quickly. The Spanish mackerel, 
with its smooth, cone-shaped body, is 
among the swiftest of fishes, and for speed 
only finds a parallel in the dolphin. There 
is a great similarity in shape between these 
two, and both cut the water like a yacht. 
If the bed of the Atlantic were drained, 
a geographical writer tells us, it would be 
a vast undulating plain, with a middle 
plateau parallel to the North American 
coast, and another plateau connecting this 
central one with northeastern South Ame- 
rica. The Atlantic is thus divided into 
three great basins. The tops of the sea 
plateaus are two miles below a sailing ship, 
and the deepest parts of the basins almost 
five miles. These plateaus are whitened 
for thousands of miles by a minute species 
of creamy shell, which cover their sides 
like snow-banks. In the deepest parts the 
sea bottom is red in color, strewn with 
volcanoes and meteoric particles, and the 
deeply incrusted bones of whales, sharks 
and other sea monsters. In the black and 
silent waters of the abysses, lighted only 
by phosphorescent animals, vegetable life 
is nearly absent, while the scanty animal 
life is nearly absent, while the scanty 
animal life consists of a few strange species 
which only in earlier geological ages can 
have been common near the surface. 
