Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 91.djvu/268

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��Popular Science Monthly

���thousand dollars to carry out her father's wishes. The model is com- plete in every detail, even to small whale boats which hang from the. davits. It measures fifty-nine feet from the figurehead to the stern, and it is eighty-nine feet from flying jibboom to spanker boom. The cost of the model alone was twenty- five thousand dollars.

��© Brown and Dawson

A life-size model of the whaling ship, Lagoda, which was built in the room in which it is exhibited

The Largest Model of a Ship Ever Constructed Under a Roof

IN the days when the American merchant marine was the pride of the entire shipping world, New Bedford, Massa- chusetts, was the port of many a prize- winning cutter. It was also the headquarters for the whalin industry. One of the early sea captains who made a fortune out of whale oil was Jonathan Bourne, whose fa- vorite ship was the Lagoda.

When Jonathan Bourne died he or- dered a model of the Lagoda — the largest model of its kind in the world — placed in a museum known as the Jonathan Bourne Whaling Museum. His daughter, Emily Howland Bourne, contributed fifty

���The scarab rolling a ball of manure many times its own size to a suitable hiding place

��The Curious Ways of Egypt's Holy Beetle

THE holy beetle of the Nile is found carved in stone every- where in Egypt — a relic of a time when crocodiles, bugs, and beetles were objects of worship. As the scarab is a dung beetle it is naturally found in the vicinity of herds and particularly in pastures where no- madic herdsmen watch their flocks. The scarab is not satisfied with merely eating manure on the spot, as are most dung beetles. It fashions perfectly rounded balls out of manure and rolls them often con- siderable distances and buries them in the sand. These dung balls serve the scarab and its brood as food. It makes several balls for itself, and others similar in appearance for the brood. All are buried in the sand. When making a ball for the young the beetle is exceedingly careful in the selection of food. It rejects all un- digested vegetable particles. The ball is fashioned into pear-shape after having been placed in the ex- cavation made to re- ceive it. A single egg is laid in a small receptacle in the elongated part of the pear. The larva, slip- ping from the egg, eats out the interior of the greater part of the ball, leaving a hollowed-out portion inside of the hard outer crust. Within this shell the chrysalis stage is then passed. — Dr. E. Bade.

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