(a quarter of a cent) a dozen for these animals, some peasants delivered fourteen hundred of them a day. Charles Martens has given some curious details concerning the immense troop of lemmings (Myodes) in Norway. I was struck with the multitude of squirrels in the Rocky Mountains. We met them at every step in passing through the wooded regions. Alcide d'Orbigny relates that when at Carmen de Moxos he was nearly suffocated by the
odor of musk in his house. It came from the thousands of bats that hung from the roof during the day. Marine mammals were also very numerous before they were pursued by man. Buffon says that in 1704 the crew of an English ship met a school of more than a thousand morses near Cherry Island, in latitude 75°.
Notwithstanding the number of beings that disappeared in the various geological epochs, I believe that the sum of the appearances surpassed that of the extinctions till the end of the Miocene. I can not assert that there has not been some diminution since that period; but we can affirm that a prodigious fecundity prevails at the present time.—Translated for the Popular Science Monthly from the Revue des Deux Mondes.
The Cambodian doctors, according to M. Paul d'Enjoy, largely use vegetable poisons as medicines, and apply them with very great skill; and they are often possessors of recipes, the secret of which is carefully kept within the family. They pretend to be acquainted with the love philter, and sell at a very high price a colorless oil with which the young men impregnate their lips in hopes of winning the young women through its magical power. The Cambodian bonzes have established in the vicinity of their monasteries, and the Annamites near their pagodas and under their own direction, refuges where the sick are taken care of gratuitously. The institutions are sustained by public charity and by the generous gifts of patients. Many of the wealthy are not ashamed to have themselves taken to these asylums, hoping that their cure may be made more complete through the protection of the ministers of God, under whose care they place themselves.
Insect chrysalides seem totally inert, and to the ordinary observer suggest a mummy rather than anything else. Yet, when occasion arises, they are able to manifest their vitality and even to be active. M. G. de Rocquigny Adanson, studying some Saturnias, opened a few of the cocoons, and having examined the insects, put them in a box in which the place of their broken silken envelope was supplied by cotton wadding. Three weeks afterward he found that they had changed position, and, examining them more closely, that they had thrown out threads and fastened themselves to the cotton. Madame Elisée Reclus, studying natural history in Switzerland, had some Vanessas much shaken by the jolts in descending the mountain, and afterward more shaken on the railway train. Observing them after they had enjoyed a few hours of quiet at home, she found that they had changed position, and, having thrown out threads and cross threads, had fastened themselves firmly to the lid of the box in which they were kept.
