Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 54.djvu/887

Rh of frogs for thirty years, and found that they are night wanderers, keeping comparatively quiet during the day and seeking their prey after dark. In the fall they leave their hunting grounds in the fields and woods and take refuge near swamps and ponds, passing the winter in the banks of rivers or the mud in the bottoms of ponds, whence they come out in the spring, when the process of reproduction begins. The frog is not sexually mature till it is four or five years old. The coupling process lasts from three to thirty days. Between its spring wakening and spawning the frog eats nothing except, perhaps, its own skin, which it moults periodically. After spawning, frogs leave the water and go to the fields and woods. They can be fed, when kept captive, upon insects and earthworms.

 

has been discovered by Professor Dolbear and Carl A. and Edward A. Bessey between the chirping of crickets and the temperature, the chirps increasing as frequently as the temperature rises. The Besseys relate, in The American Naturalist, that when, one cool evening, a cricket was caught and brought into a warm room, it began in a few minutes to chirp nearly twice as rapidly as the out-of-door crickets, and that its rate very nearly conformed to the observed rate maintained other evenings out of doors under the same temperature conditions.

of Colombo, Ceylon, records, in Nature, a rainfall at Nedunkeni, in the northern province of Ceylon, December 15 and 16, 1697, of 31.76 inches in twenty-four hours. The highest previous records, as cited by him, are at Joyeuse, France, 31.17 inches in twenty-two hours; Genoa, 30 inches in twenty-six hours; on the hills above Bombay, 24 inches in one night; and on the Khasia Hills, India, 30 inches in each of five successive days. The average annual rainfall at Nedunkeni has been 64.70 inches, but in 1897 the total amount was 121.85 inches. The greatest annual rainfall is on the Khasia Hills, India, with 600 inches. The wettest station in Ceylon is Padupola, in the central province, with 230.85 inches as the mean of twenty-six years, but in 1897 the amount was 243.07 inches.

Korean postage stamps are printed in the United States. As explained in the United States consular reports, they are of four denominations, and all alike except in color and denomination. Of the inscriptions, the characters on the top are ancient Chinese, and those at the bottom, having the same meaning, are Korean; the characters on the right are Korean and those on the left are Chinese, both giving the denominations, with the English translation just below the center of the stamp. The plum blossom in each corner is the royal flower of the present Ye dynasty, which has been in existence more than five hundred years, and the figures at the corners of the center piece represent the four spirits that stand at the corners of the earth and support it on their shoulders. The national emblem in the center is an ancient Chinese phallic device.

in La Nature calls to mind that the year 1898 was the "jubilee" of the sea serpent, the first mention of a sight of the monster—whether fabulous or not is still undecided—having been made by the captain and officers of the British ship Daedalus in 1848. They said they saw it between the Cape of Good Hope and St. Helena, and that it was about six hundred feet long. Since then views of sea serpents have been reported nearly every year, but none has ever been caught or seen so near or for so long a time as to be positively identified. There are several creatures of the deep which, seen for an instant, might be mistaken with the aid of an excited imagination for a marine serpent; and it is not wholly impossible that some descendants of the gigantic saurians of old may still be living in the ocean undetected by science.

results of a study of the winter food of the chickadee by Clarence M. Weed, of the New Hampshire College Agricultural Experiment Station, shows that more than half of it consists of insects, a very large proportion of which are taken in the form of eggs. Vegetation of various sorts made up a little less than a quarter of the food; but two thirds of this consisted of buds and bud scales that were accidentally introduced along with plant-lice eggs. These eggs made up more than one fifth of the entire food, and formed the most remarkable element of the bill of fare. The destruction of these eggs of plant lice is probably the most important service which the chickadee renders during its winter residence. Insect eggs of many other kinds were found in the food, among them those of the tent caterpillar and the fall cankerworm, and the larvae of several kinds of moths, including those of the common apple worm.

Merchants' Association of San Francisco has been trying the experiment of sprinkling a street with sea water, and finds that such water binds the dirt together between the paving stones, so that when it is dry no loose dust is formed to be raised by the wind; that sea water does not dry so quickly as fresh water, so that it has been claimed when salt water has been used that one load of it is equal to three loads of fresh water. The salt water which is deposited on the street absorbs moisture from the air during the night, whereby the street is 