Science Notes

Freethought Review, Volume I, Issue 3, 1 December 1883, Page 11

Science Notes

John Riley and Patrick Manley, while excavating on Edward G. McCleary's farm in Watervliet Center, N.Y., recently, unearthed a mastodon at a depth of about thirty feet. Some of the bones will be taken to the Geographical Museum in Albany. A large smooth stone of reddish color, and shaped like a heart, was found near the ribs.

It would seem from experiments made by M. Gustav Hauser, that the sense of smell in insects is seated in the antennae. Glass rods moistened with oil of turpentine or acetic acid were presented to a great number of insects, causing them to turn sharply round ; but when their antenna? had been previously removed, the same insects gave no signs of perception, even when they were placed quite close to the strong smelling substances. Blow-flies, from which the third joint of the antennas had been cut away, were no longer attracted by putrid meat, though they flew about as before. Enveloping the antennas with a thin coating of paraffin produced the same effect.

One of the most singular features in the scenery of the Territory of Idaho, in the United States, is the occurrence of dark rocky chasms, into which large streams suddenly disappear. These fissures are old lava channels, produced by the outside of the molten mass cooling and forming a tube, through which the still molten lava passes till exhausted, —the roof of which having at some point fallen in, presents an opening into which the river plunges and is lost. At one place on the banks of the Snake, one of the rivers reappears, gushing from a cleft high up in the basaltic walls, from which it leaps into the Snake River below. Where this stream has its origin, or at what point it is swallowed up, remains a mystery. The lava conduits are also frequently found packed with ice masses which never entirely melt.

At the last meeting of the British Association, a paper was read on the so-called " missing link" " Krao." " Krao," we are told, possesses no ape-like characteristics inherited from the family of which mankind is a cadet branch. She is a very human child, born of slave parents of normal type. She has one or two ape-like tricks, easily taught, such as bending her hands and feet backwards ; and using her cheeks as a pouch for food. There is no abnormal appearance of a tail, and the foot is such as any woman might be proud of. The only peculiarity is the hairy skin, from which she seems to be accepted, by the professors, as possibly a " throw back," a capricious reversion to an earlier type. Dr. Garson thought that in all probability primeval man was covered with hair; and that a return to that condition was one of those freaks of nature less common than is often supposed. Modern physiologists go further, and say that the embryonic history of man includes periods when he isundistinguishable from fish, fowl, and quadruped, successively thus comprising in a short space a summary of the evolution of ages.