Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 7.djvu/522

506 to hold a consultation. The chirping, twittering, murmuring, and occasional ejaculations, were all unmistakable. In a few moments these all ceased, and the work commenced. Each took hold of the muslin strip, at about the same distance in each case from the ends, and, taking flight simultaneously, bore it away. Soon there was much jabbering at the nest: the birds could not agree how to use the strip, and it was finally abandoned; but so, too, was the nest, and the birds left the neighborhood.

Parasite in a Child's Mouth.—At a meeting of scientific men lately held in New Brunswick, New Jersey, Prof. Lockwood exhibited a thread-worm which, he said, was sent him by a student of Rutgers College, two years ago, who found it in an apple which he was eating. It looked so like an animal parasite that the professor was puzzled to fix its character. He stated that Prof Leidy had recently described before the Academy of Natural Sciences, at Philadelphia, the same worm, also taken from an apple; who also said that this worm was a parasite of the larva of the codling moth, whose grub, or larva, as is well known, infests the young apple, feeding inside of it, and thus causing it to fall from the tree to the ground, when the larva leaves the fruit and enters the ground, in which to pass its pupa state. Thus the worm, whose name is Mermis acuminata, was really an animal parasite, sustaining its own life apparently by a vegetable diet, after the death of the larva codling, either by absorption, or its own consumption of it. Dr. Leidy called the attention of the Academy to the fact that twenty-five years ago he described before them the same entozoön taken from the mouth of a child. At that time he was ignorant of the origin of the parasite. It now seems fair to infer that the child had been eating an infested apple, and that the worm had a second time changed its nidus for that of the child's mouth.

Summer Temperature of Scotland.—Mr. McNab, Director of the Edinburgh Botanic Garden, last year published some facts going to show that the mean summer temperature of Scotland has been growing colder during the last two or three generations. According to Mr. McNab, sundry plants which thrived in Scotland fifty or seventy-five years ago can now scarcely be grown there. Mr. William Tillery communicates to the Gardener's Chronicle several other facts confirmatory of McNab's conclusions. Forty years ago, nearly all the gardens of note in South Ayrshire used to exhibit at the horticultural shows peaches and nectarines grown on walls in the open air. Some good white and black figs were likewise ripened on the open walls in favorable summers; but this is of very rare occurrence now. At the present time, gardeners in the most favored districts of Scotland and in Northern and Midland England are lamenting the unproductive state of their peach and nectarine trees in the open air. A weather-register, kept for the last thirty-eight years, shows that of late years the winters have been more open, the frosts in the spring months later and more severe, and the rainfall more irregular, than formerly.

International Weather Reports.—It has been proposed to establish an exchange of telegraphic weather reports between the Signal-Office at Washington and the meteorological bureaus of the various countries of Europe, and it is claimed that such exchange would be likely to afford valuable data for forecasting the weather on both sides of the Atlantic. Mr. W. Clement Ley, who has worked for a considerable time at the comparison of United States with European weather-charts, holds that such exchange would be undesirable for Europe, on the following grounds: 1. Only a small proportion of the storms experienced on the American side of the Atlantic can subsequently be distinctly traced in Europe at all. 2. Of those thus traceable, the majority are felt severely only in the extreme north of Europe, and are not productive of serious results on the coasts of Britain, France, or Denmark. 3. The velocity of their progress varies indefinitely, and could not be deduced from the velocity of the currents experienced in them, even if the latter were not variable also. 4. Many of the most destructive European storms occur when pressures over the Eastern United States coast