THE MEDITERRANEAN NATURALIST 
289 
The place once occupied in the interest of the 
scientifiejand- the curious by Chang and Eng is 
now filled by Radica and Doddica, two little girls 
from Orissa, India. These bright and pretty 
children, are 3j years old. They are united by a 
flexible bony attachment from breast to breast, 
and below this is a visceral connection. There is 
only one navel. Food given either satisfies both, 
and medicine given one effects the other in a less 
degree. A sentence begun by one is often finished 
by the other. The flexibility of the connection is 
shown by the fact that when sleeping, one child 
lies on her side and the other on her black, These 
remarkable twins the Scientific American informs 
us will appear at the World’s Fair. 
The best known glaciers, remarks Mr. W. B. 
Dunning, are in Switzerland, where some 400, 
varying in length from five to fourteen miles, are 
scattered through the Alpine valleys. Their width 
varies from half a mile to one mile, and their 
greatest thickness is estimated at about 1000 feet. 
But these are insignificant when compared with 
some Greenland or Alaska glaciers. Muir glacier, 
fm instance, occupies a tract some 30 or 40 miles 
wide, from which nine main streams and seventeen 
branches unite to form a grand trunk, that pushes 
a mighty wall of solid ice, 500 feet wide and 700 
deep, into Glacier Bay. The great Humboldt far 
outstrips this, being fully 115 miles wide and some 
2000 feet thick. Nordenskjold, who penetrated 
123 miles inland, was unable to find its end. In 
all probability, it is an arm of one gigantic field of 
ice v capping the interior of Greenland, and moving 
gradually but ceaselessly toward the sea. 
The obelisks of the Pharaohs were cut from red 
syenite, a rock often miscalled granite. In the 
quarries of Syene, according to the writer of “Cleo- 
patra’s Needle,'’ may be seen an unfinished obelisk, 
adhering to the native rock, and still clearly show- 
ing traces of the workmen’s tools and the method 
employed in separating these immense monoliths. 
The edge of the block is marked by a sharply-cut 
groove, containing holes evidently bored for wooden 
wedges. In completing the operation, the wedges 
were firmly driven into place and the, groove was 
filled with water, when the swelling of the wood 
split the rock throughout the length of the groove. 
The block was afterward slid on rollers to the 
edge of the Nile. Here a large raft was built about 
it, and at the next inundation the finished stone 
was floated down to the city where it was to be 
erected, and was pushed by thousands of hands on 
rollers up an incliued plane to the pedestal prepared 
for it. 
The sun’s rays pouring on the desert of Sahara, 
says Mr. W. H. Preece, are generating the equiva- 
lent of millions of horse power in the heat 
absorbed by that great sandy waste. Sunshine is 
power, Coal is merely preserved sunbeams. The 
solar heat acting on one acre in the tropics would 
if it were possible to utilize it, produce 4,000 horse 
power for nine hours every day. To utilize this 
heat is not a mere dream: it is certainly possible to 
convert it into electrical energy by thermo-electric 
apparatus, though we have not yet heard of its 
being done. The earth itself in its daily rotation 
round its axis is an immense store of energy, if 
we could by any means reduce a little of this spin 
we should lengthen the day, but we should 
obtain energy. Mr. Gisbert Kapp has calculated 
that if the day increased only one second 1000 
years we should during the whole of the century 
obtain 10,000,000 horse power continuously. There 
is no doubt that the tidal wave is gradually 
acting upon the earth’s spin in this way, but the 
energy is not available for man, and is wasted. 
It is believed, according to Mr. P. L. Simmonds, 
F. L. S., that there are five times as many insects 
as there are species of all other living things put 
together. The oak alone supports 450 species of in- 
sects, and 200 kinds make their home in the pine, 
Forty years ago Humboldt estimated that the 
number of species preserved in collections was be- 
tween 150,000 and 170,000 but scientific men now 
say that there must be more than three-quarters 
of a million, without taking into account the para- 
site creatures. Of the 35,000 species in Europe, 
however, not more than 3,500 are noxious or des- 
tructive. There are more than 100,000 kinds of 
beetles. Such being an enumeration of the diffe- 
rent forms, what an array of figures would be re- 
quire for tabulating a census of individual insects 
each a distinct living thing, Some single species 
include an incredible number of specimens. The 
