NEWS AND SUNDRIES. 
91 
Heavy Heifer. —W. L. Mullin, Winfield, Kas., writes to the 
Kansas City Indicator , as follows: I thought 1 would send you 
a description of perhaps the largest heifer in the world. She 
was four years old last May, clear white, and weighs 2,800 lbs., 
17 hands high, 12 feet around the girth, and 32 inches around the 
forearm. She was raised in Cowley county, Kansas. 
Cattle Census. —Out of 157,588,521, the number of cattle es¬ 
timated to be in the world, 35,907,791, including all kinds, were 
in this country at the taking of the last census. Out of 382,763, 
015 ; sheep we had 51,183,903 head. Out of 81,990,330 hogs, we 
had 47,688,874, which would place the United States as the fore¬ 
most hog country in the world, with more than one half of the 
grand total.— The Fanner 1 s Review. 
Preservation of Anatomical Specimens. —L. Gerlach re¬ 
commends the glycerine process of Van Vetter, which has been 
somewhat modified, first by Stieda, and then by Gerlach himself. 
Stieda’s recipe is as follows : Make a mixture of 6 parts of gly¬ 
cerine, 1 of brown sugar, and J part of saltpeter; Gerlach uses 
12 instead of 6 parts of glycerine. The preparations are cleaned 
and laid in this liquid, in wnich they remain from three to six 
weeks, according to their size. When taken out they have a dark 
brown color and are quite firm ; they are then hung up in a 
chamber of the temperature of 12°-14° R. (59° to 63Fahr.) In 
the course of eight to ten days they become soft and flexible, but 
must be allowed to hang from two to six months longer, to be 
available for demonstrations. The more glycerine used, the 
lighter in color the preparations remain. The method is best 
applied to preparations of articulations, to sense organs (eye, ear), 
larynx, etc. The formation of a crystalline precipitate, which 
sometimes appears in the drying, is met by the increase in the 
proportion of glycerine, and a diminution of the saltpeter and 
sugar. If large objects are to be set up, such as whole extremities 
with their muscles, or the thorax with the ligaments dissected, 
pure glycerine is preferable to the cheap crude article, for speci¬ 
mens turn out whiter and less hard in it. Gerlach has used it for 
temporal bone with tympanum and auditory ossicles, and obtained 
