MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS

Hokitika Guardian, 24 June 1920, Page 3

MISCELLANEOUS ITEMS

FROG WOMAN. PARIS, May 4

Over the serpents’ house in the Jardin des Plantes—the famous Paris Zoo —Dr Marie Phisalix sits in her laboratory among her snakes and salamanders, her little singing toads and grass erreen tree frogs, working at her special subject, the presence of poison in rentiles and the medical use to which this can be put. “Here,” she said, taking up a lovely newt with the resplendent orange waistcoat which Nature gives him for courting times, “here is a gentleman whose poison is not in a gland provided with a fang but under his skin,” and she explained that this device, if it left him defenceless before his enemy the snake, yet defended his race since no snake could eat two newts. He dies of the' effects of the first.

Mme. Phisalix is the only woman engaged in research work at the Pans Natural History Museum and she holds a unique position in the scientific world. She took her degree at (Sevres Women’s College, and was a professor of natural science in different lycees • while preparing to stand for a doctor’s degree, which she obtained in 1900 with a thesis on tlie salamander and poisons from the medical point of view.

BABY DROPPED IN STREAM. LONDON, May 3. While Mrs Small, the wife of a farm servant, of Tayport, near Dundee, was out with a four and a half months old luiby she was overcome by faintess and dropped the child in a stream. Before she recovered the infant was drowned. Mrs Small was discovered an hour later dripping wet and in a prostrate condition, clutching the dead child in her ijrms. ,