Page:Hardwicke's Science-Gossip - Volume 1.pdf/126

and water; warm over a spirit-lamp until ebullition, then wash the leaf in water, place on a fresh slip, and add a drop of iodide of zinc solution, and put on the cover. If the leaf is dry, steep it previously

in water. The preparations thus obtained are amongst the most beautiful of microscopic objects, and the physiologist cannot but be delighted with the precision with which the different layers of the cell are mapped out."

A most curious fact in natural history has recently been brought to light by the decipherment of Assyrian inscriptions. The history of the artificial migration of plants—a very interesting and intricate subject—has been carried back to a period of great antiquity. Kūthāmī, a Mendaite writer in the fourth century, A.D., tells us that the kings of Assyria were accustomed to bring back with them from their campaigns in foreign countries any plant which they thought would be valuable and useful; that in this way, for instance, the cherry tree was transplanted from the banks of the Jordan to the gardens of Nineveh and Babylon. These statements are strikingly confirmed by an inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I., an Assyrian monarch, who was carried captive to Babylon, B.C. 1110. The king therein says:—"The pine-tree, the likkarina-tree, and the algum-tree, these trees, which none of the former kings, my fathers, had planted, I took from the countries which I subdued, and I planted them in the groves of my own country, and I called (the plantations) by the name of groves; whatever was not in my own country I took and placed in the groves of Assyria." The translation "algum-tree" is not quite certain; the word in the original is alaka(ni), which certainly bears a greater resemblance to the native Sanskrit name valgu(ka) than does the Hebrew almug. If the identification can be maintained, it will be a proof of the occupation of the Malabar coast by the Aryans as early as the twelfth century B.C.. This will not be the only case in which ethnology has received important aid from the botanical department of natural history. The northern home of our Aryan ancestors is borne evidence to by the fact that the "birch"—the denizen of a cold climate—is the only tree having the same name both in Eastern and Western Aryan, i.e., both in Sanskrit and in the various languages of Europe. So, again, we learn from the fact that "flax" (Lat. linum), Greek λίνον, Goth. lein) is known by different names in Eastern and Western Aryan, that the separation of the forefathers of the Hindus and of the Greeks and Romans took place before either had exchanged an agricultural for a pastoral life.

We have reason to hope that the present researches into the early records of mankind may throw some light upon the primitive history and cultivation of the cereals.

In Science-Gossip (p. 64), before quoting from "Knapp's Journal of a Naturalist," you say there is some confusion between the accounts in "Montague's Ornithological Dictionary" and "Knapp's Journal" respecting the great and the red-backed shrike. As a daughter of the late Mr. Knapp, I am able to say the bird he mentions is Lanius collurio; that bird was common in Gloucestershire. I never saw the great shrike except in a private collection of stuffed birds; with us the red-backed shrike would often attack the nests of the small birds, and carry off the unfledged young.

In the neighbourhood I now live in, not far from Whitehaven, Lanius collurio is often seen. In the summer of 1857 or 1858, when strolling down a lane between the villages of Netherton and St. Bees with my little boy, we fell in with a brood of young butcher-birds with their parents; and while telling the child why called butcher-birds, the constant buzzing of the dorr beetle attracted my attention to a thorn bush, where we found (besides moths) three or four dorrs, not fixed as I have always before seen them the body spitted, but with the thorn in each instance through one wing case, and these were spinning round and round. This was recalled to my recollection this summer, by finding a dorr beetle flying about with a large round hole in one elytra; in all probability this fortunate beetle, by long spinning, had worn the hole, and thus been enabled to fly off its spiked perch.

N.B.—The shrike in Cumberland is called skrike-pie or skrike bird.—L. M. P.

In the beauty of form, or of moral character, or of the material creation, it is that which is most veiled which is most beautiful.—Stonemason of Saint Point.