Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 11.djvu/265

Rh the least. But recent experiments made by Prof. Kühne, of Heidelberg, appear to show that the image does remain. He took a rabbit and fixed its head and one of its eyeballs at a distance of about five feet from a small opening in a window-shutter. The head was covered for five minutes with a black cloth and then exposed for three minutes to a somewhat clouded mid-day sky. The rabbit was then instantly decapitated; the eyeball which had been exposed was extirpated in yellow light, then opened and instantly plunged into a weak solution of alum. Two minutes after death the second eyeball, without removal from the head, was subjected to exactly the same processes. On the following morning the retinæ of both eyes were carefully isolated, separated from the optic nerve, and turned. They exhibited a nearly square, sharp image, with sharply-defined edges.

Extirpation of our Larger Mammals.—In a paper on the extirpation of our larger indigenous mammals, published in the Penn Monthly, Mr. J. A. Allen remarks that the larger, the less sagacious, or the otherwise more easily-captured species, have always been the first to be destroyed. The walrus, being hunted for its ivory and its oil, soon became extinct in the Gulf of St. Lawrence; the bison wholly disappeared east of the Mississippi (south of Wisconsin) prior to the year 1800; the moose and the caribou were early pressed back into the remoter northern forests; and the elk everywhere quickly disappeared before the advancing settlements. Formerly abundant from the Great Lakes nearly to the Gulf coast, its sole survivors east of the Mississippi for the last few decades have been confined to the least frequented parts of the Alleghanies, where few, if any, still survive. Thirty years ago it was abundant over nearly all of the prairies, plains, and mountain valleys of the Great West, where it is now confined within comparatively narrow boundaries, and its present rapid rate of decrease portends its speedy total extirpation south of the forty-ninth parallel. The Virginia deer, once a common denizen of the whole eastern half of the United States, now scarcely exists in New England south of the forests of Maine and Northern New Hampshire, or in New York south or west of the great Adirondack Wilderness, or anywhere in the Middle States away from the mountains. It has also disappeared from a large part of the Atlantic coast-region farther southward, and from the greater part of the area between the Great Lakes and the Tennessee river. The bear, the panther, the gray wolf, and the lynx, have become similarly restricted. The fisher, the marten, and the Canada porcupine, former inhabitants of the northern parts of the northern tier of States, as well as of the Appalachian highlands to or beyond Virginia, have only here and there a few lingering representatives in the least frequented parts of the mountains, and are much more rare than formerly in the forests of Northern New England and the great unsettled region north of the St. Lawrence. The same is true of the beaver, except that it had a much more extended range to the southward, being a former inhabitant of Northern Florida and the middle and northern portions of the Gulf States, and of all the intervening region thence northward.

Psychic Phenomena.—Mr. Sergeant Cox, in a letter to the London Spectator, made the assertion that no one who had investigated "psychic phenomena" ever had "come to any other conclusion than that they were real." To this Moncure D. Conway replies as follows:

"I beg to inform that gentleman that I have for more than twenty years, both in the United States and in England, and in the presence of well-known mediums as well as private circles, diligently investigated the subject, and I have never seen any phenomena at all worthy of notice, except such as indicate the audacity of some persons and the weakness of others."

Extending the Meat-Supply.—One of the most enthusiastic hippophagists of Paris, M. Decroix, not content with advocating the use of horse-flesh for food, now would have people eat the flesh of diseased animals. He has made it a practice to eat the flesh of horses killed in his service, which had glanders or farcy, and, whether thoroughly or partially cooked, he found no evil results to his health. Further,