FACTS AND OBSERVATIONS. 
221 
o^clock on Thursday morning. Several of the most eminent 
medical men in the city were called in to the unfortunate 
patients, but their skill proved unavailing. The case, it 
appears, is almost without a parallel in medical experience. 
Singular Lusus Naturae. —We have received a very 
remakable lusus natures, the product of a ewe, from Mr. G. 
T. Baldwin, M.R.C.V.S., Fakenham. It was brought forth 
with three healthy and perfectly formed lambs, itself being 
the first born. It possessed neither brain, spinal marrow, 
heart, lungs, nor digestive organs; nevertheless the blood¬ 
vessels were numerous and large, and three out of its 
four limbs fairly developed. The fourth limb was broader 
and shorter than the others, and bore a far greater resem¬ 
blance to the foot of the dog than to that of the sheep, by 
possessing five imperfectly formed digits, three of which were 
of nearly equal length. The common integument, which was 
freely covered with wool all over, formed a pouch-like ap¬ 
pendage at the cephalic extremity of the monstrosity, a little 
below which a fragment of osseous deposit existed, in which 
a single tusk-like tooth was placed, as in a rudimental jaw. 
The limbs and some other parts being comparatively well- 
developed, it may be asked, by what power, in the absence 
of a heart, was the circulation maintained for such a pur¬ 
pose ? 
Black Periosteum OF Fowls. —Dr. Miche having sent 
to M. Flourens some of the bones of a Cochin China fowl 
the periosteum of which was quite black, he exhibited to the 
Academy the skeleton of a common fowl in a similar state, 
Six chickens out of a brood of twelve were stated to possess 
the same peculiarities. 
Mr. G. H. Inskip, writing to the editor of the Intellectual 
Ohserver, says that they frequently found, while employed 
surveying in the Gulf of Siam, the common fowls pur¬ 
chased at Bangkok and along the coast to have apparently 
black bones, with dark flesh, looking as if saturated with 
pale-black ink. 
Animal Food annually required for London.— 
It is calculated that the metropolis alone consumes, in the 
course of a year, no fewer than 270,000 oxen, 30,000 calves, 
1,500,000 sheep, and 30,000 pigs, to say nothing of the 
flocks of fowl and shoals of fish which find their way into the 
same channels of consumption. The total value of the flesh 
annually imported into London, alive and dead, cannot be 
