Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 36.djvu/152

142 distinguish their own cocoons from another spider's, or from a pith ball of the same size; and one of them even accepted a lead shot over which the covering of a cocoon had been stretched. In the sense of sight, they had great difficulty in finding their cocoons, even when removed from them only three quarters of an inch, and performed long and tortuous routes before they reached them; but in other matters they showed that they could see well enough. The trouble about the cocoons arose from the fact that the spiders never see them when carrying them, and therefore did not know them by sight, but depended on touch to identify them. The color sense appeared to be fairly well developed, with a very decided preference for red. The authors do not believe that spiders feign death. Epeirids drop and lie still for a time, but that is because, if they run about, they have difficulty in finding the thread that leads back to their web. Other spiders keep still, if at all, only for a few moments, but not long enough to give an appearance of death. Darwin's explanation is, therefore, correct, that the habit of lying motionless is the result of natural selection, and has been acquired by different species in different degrees, according to its usefulness in their various modes of life.

A Patriarchal Estate.—A patriarchal system of management is on trial on the estate of five thousand acres of Baron Raimondo Franchetti at Canedole, Mantua, Italy. Machinery and manures are liberally employed. Nobody pays any rent. The parish priest, schoolmaster, and doctor are employed and maintained by the proprietor. Sixty children are fed and looked after during the day in the Kindergarten, to and from which they are conveyed in an omnibus. The buildings are grouped, at the Corte de Canedole, around a square of fifteen thousand square yards area, with the master's house facing the entrance, and the steward's and other farm officers' dwellings, and the workshops, stables, barns, etc., near at hand. The whole is surrounded by deep canals flushed with running water, and flanked by avenues of plane-trees. Watchmen go their rounds at night. Workhours are regulated by the sound of the bell; strict discipline is enforced; the upper hands set the example of steady and serious work, and grand balls are occasionally given by the baroness in the court-yard to all the peasants. It is not known how profitable the experiment has been, but it has not been a failure.

The Human Factor in Slums.—Mr. Frederick Greenwood, in a discussion in the "Nineteenth Century" of the problem of "Misery in Great Cities," maintains that the slums and squalid dens that abound in parts of London and other enormous cities "correspond far more than most kind souls are willing to perceive to the measure of depravity and weakness of the human mind; and at the same time to the proportion of incapables in a state of society which does not allow its incapables to perish." Every village and town has its bad spots and its centers of degraded population, corresponding in extent with its size; and it is only the vast extent of the mischief in London, commensurate with the dimensions of the city, and the appalling magnitude of the problems which it suggests, that excite so much commiseration and alarm. Hence it may be concluded that any local and spasmodic efforts to ameliorate the evils that exist are destined to only a very limited success, and that permanent advantage is likely to accrue only from measures that tend to raise the general social condition.

Inheritance of Acquired Habit.—In illustration of the hereditary transmission of characteristics acquired by habit, Prof. M. M. Hartog relates in "Nature" the case of a person who is unequally myopic in his eyes, and very astigmatic in the left one. On account of the bad images given by this eye for near objects, he was compelled in childhood to mask it, and acquired the habit when writing of leaning his head on the left arm, so as to blind it, or of resting the left temple and eye on the hand, with the elbow on the table. After putting on spectacles, when fifteen years old, he lost the habit of leaning. His two children, while they have not inherited the congenital defect, being emmetropic in both eyes, have received his acquired habit, and have to be watched to keep them from hiding the left eye when writing. A somewhat similar case of inheritance of acquired habit is related by J.