Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/114

86 veloped so large as to crowd out the rest of the body.

The various acids, chemicals, and bacterial poisons used seem to act upon the multiplied egg, after it has subdivided many times into a compound egg. These are fragments broken off by the poisons in the blood of the mother, and the particular divisions which are poisoned cause the malformations and freaks.

Examples of eggs within eggs have been attributed to the serpentine movements of the flexible canal through which they pass. Hens frequently lay several double eggs in succession. Fere, a distinguished investigator, claims that he succeeded in producing double eggs in a hen which normally laid single eggs, simply by drugging her with belladonna. Glaser, another biologist of note, has described the ovary of a hen which habitually laid double eggs and concludes that fusion is the explanation of some double eggs.

The one which Professor Chichester wishes to record is a "gourd-shaped" egg. Professor Hargitt studied one, which was not preserved carefully, and on account of evap-





oration, the condition was such that he could not be certain of the presence of yolk in the smaller end. He assumed that the egg was comprised of about normal parts in the larger end, and that the smaller consisted of only albumen, "its yellowish tint having resulted from the evaporating process which had taken place."

Many cases of twins and double monsters in fish have been recorded but no case of apparent modification of structure by chemical means in one of the twin fish mentioned. Dr. Chichester fertilized the eggs from several female Funduli by the sperm of one male and at the proper stage, he added a dilute solution of ether in plain sea-water. Many of the eggs died. Two days later the water was changed for fresh sea-water and a few of the dead eggs were removed. Three days from the beginning of the experiment the dead eggs were picked out, and the remaining few were placed in fresh sea-water. The living eggs numbered two hundred and fifteen, and the uncounted dead eggs about six hundred. At the end of six days' time the normal embryos were separated from the abnormal.

In the first lot