it is here to-day and off to-morrow; but disappears in the beginning of September. Mr. Bartlett informs me that the mouths of the young of fruit-eating warblers are pink or flesh-coloured; the young of the insect-eating warblers, on the contrary, have the inside of their mouths yellow.

GOLDEN-CRESTED REGULUS, p. 53.—Mr. G. Napier writes:"The golden-crested regulus (Regulus cristatus) is a constant resident in Britain. It forms a compact nest of moss, which in texture resembles that of the finch's. It is often adorned with lichens, as well as bound together with spiders' webs, and the inside is lined with feathers. One nest I possess has a turkey feather as a valve or trap door cunningly placed by the bird at the entrance of the nest. This bird usually suspends its nest from a branch of an overhanging yew or fir-tree. It is of a pork-pie shape; I have one as open as a chaffinch's. The eggs are most commonly of a nearly uniform pale yellow buff, but some have a white ground, with spots of dark purple and dark red; others are very nearly white, like some varieties of the eggs of the long-tailed tit.

"The nest of the wood-wren (R. sibilatrix) is a dome structure, the entrance to which is usually from the side. In shape it resembles that of the dipper, for it has a flattened appearance; it is made of the stems of the bedstraw intermixed with grass, moss, and dead leaves. The lining in both the nests I have is of grass; but sometimes horsehair is used. The ground colour of the egg is white or yellowish white, with spots of ash-blue and umber distinctly defined, and scattered all over. Some have a zone of spots towards the large end, but in others the spots are equally distributed."

TOADS, FROGS, AND NEWTS, p. 54.-The ponds in the brickfields about London produce toads and frogs in great quantities. The only sale for frogs and snakes is at the Zoological Gardens, where they are used for feeding purposes. The market price of frogs averages 6d. per dozen.

The new snake-eating snake, Ophiophagus elaps, a kind of cobra from India, is raising the price of common snakes in the market. He has devoured no less than eighty-two common snakes between March and November.

I do not believe in the "shower of frogs" story.

When frogs get "legged," from being loggerheads or tadpoles, they are wonderfully migratory things, like eels, always on the move. A very remarkable plague of frogs occurred on the flat lands near Windsor in June 1875.

The legend of toads curing people of cancer and other complaints, says Mr. Davy, is all "Old Mother Hubbard." A hundred years ago people used to make a living by quackery of all sorts, and servants and farm-labourers used to put about that they had been "cured by a toad." Even in our time there is always some quack doctor about who says he can cure cancer. I am afraid this is impossible.

The cancer-doctor of White's time had evidently set up toads as a remedy for this disease. At my father's rectory, near Islip, a woman once gave her child a half-grown frog to suck, as she had been told it would cure the thrush round the child's mouth. It is astonishing how these old relics of wonderful cures remain in the recollection of country people. When with the 2nd Life Guards at Aldershot I heard the story of a man having been cured of some disease-fits, I think-by moss taken from the skull of a highwayman, whose skeleton had been for many years hanging in chains on a hill near the camp.

Newts are often dug out at places one mile from water. They are found ten inches down in the ground. They are found by men when chrysalis-digging round roots of trees and along sides of old walls; this is where the best chrysalis hunting-ground is situated. Mr. Davy can discover the haunts of caterpillars where there is clear ground underneath the tree, by looking for the excrement which has fallen from the trees; he then shakes off the caterpillars. Some caterpillars are fetched down by the first sudden jerk; some, on the contrary, will hold the tighter after the first jerk; some "web up" and come into fly the same year; some burrow in the ground till the next spring.

FROG CULTURE, p. 54.-An American pisciculturist proposes that some enterprising persons should turn their attention to frogculture; and he gives careful directions for procuring and treating the spawn of frogs. The spawn will hatch in about fifteen days, and if the tadpoles and young frogs are placed in a suitable position, they may be easily reared, and a large profit made. The mode of feeding the frogs is, to place pieces of meat, or other substances, to attract the flies, upon which the frogs feed; they will also eat maggots of decayed meat, and even the meat itself. It appears that the demand for frogs in America is increasing, and in that case a frog-farm might be made a good investment.

The Americans have it that when the bull-frogs croak the gentlemen frogs sit on a log and say "More rum;" the Lady frogs croak Cider too.' If the reader will pronounce these words very

quickly, he will find that an idea of the croaking of frogs is obtained.

SNAKES' EGGS, p. 57.-The engraving below shows the eggs of the common snake just ready to hatch out. I found them in a dunghill in Aldermaston Park, Reading, when on a visit to my hospitable and kind friend, Higford Burr. I have thus described them in my "Log-Book of a Fisherman and Zoologist:"-" Lifting up the straw most carefully, I was delighted to find first one, then two, then a dozen eggs. The squire and I then proceeded leisurely to dissect out the nest with our pocket-knives and a dung-fork.

blackbird's; they are They have no hard composed of a soft Some of the eggs were

Snakes' eggs are not quite so large as a round at both ends like a sugar-plum. shell like a hen's egg, but the shell is elastic substance, like thin wash-leather. lying quite separate. The greater part were, however, stuck firmly together, so tightly that it was almost impossible to tear them apart without breaking the skin. The eggs were not held by a ligature, but appeared pasted together by some strong adhesive gum, end to end; most of the eggs were quite distended; the shells of some had fallen in, and they looked crumpled.

The appearance of the eggs in this dungheap, just as the parent snake or snakes had placed them, was so striking, that I took them home and cast them in plaster of Paris, old snake and all. The cast, coloured to nature, is now in my museum.

"There were sixty-four eggs altogether in this one bunch. I do not know from experience how many eggs the common snake lays, but I should say from twenty to thirty. It is, therefore, probable that more than one snake had chosen the spot on this dunghill to deposit their eggs, just as one salmon will deposit her eggs in a favourable place without consideration for the other mother salinon that precedes or follows her.

The temperature where the eggs were deposited [in the dungheap] was about 84° in the sun, and the nest was buried about eighteen inches deep on the southern aspect, as though the mother snake knew that that was the best place for the eggs. I then proceeded to dissect some of these eggs. A few of them were blanks, containing nothing, but all the rest were good eggs. When the skin was cut through, a quantity of clear albumen came out, just the same as the white of a hen's egg. Floating in this was a yolk of a much yellower colour than that of the hen's egg, and inside this yolk was discoverable the embryo snake. Out of the three embryo baby snakes I examined two of them were quite lively, but gelatinous, and as yet not well enough developed to move more than to give a slight wriggle. The heart, however, could distinctly be seen to beat under the transparent skin for some seconds. The brain also was very prominent. In the drawing two little snakes are represented as just hatched out. My readers should search for snakes' eggs in old dunghills in August and September. My friend Mr. Burr preserves snakes in his park; he will not allow them to be killed. Vipers, however, are kept down as much as possible."

The drawing (p. 361) shows the wonderful manner in which the vertebræ of snakes are united, so as to combine strength with freedom of motion. This wondrous structure has been so ably described by Dr. Roget, in his Bridgewater Treatise on Animal and Vegetable Physiology, which everyone should read, that I quote it as a sample of the Doctor's power of describing evidences of design :

"It is evident that, in the absence of all external instruments. of prehension and of progressive motion, it is necessary that the spine should be rendered extremely flexible, so as to adapt itself to a great variety of movements. This extraordinary flexibility is given, first, by the subdivision of the spinal column into a great number of small pieces; secondly, by the great freedom of

their articulations; and thirdly, by the peculiar mobility and connection of the ribs.

"Numerous as are the vertebræ of the eel, the spine of which consists of above a hundred, that of a serpent is in general formed of a still greater number. In the rattle-snake (Crotalus horridus), there are about two hundred; and above three hundred have been counted in the spine of the Coluber natrix. These vertebræ are all united by ball-and-socket joints, as in the adult batrachia; the posterior rounded eminence of each vertebra being received into the anterior surface of the next. While provision has thus been made for extent of motion, extraordinary care has at the same time been bestowed upon the security of the joints. Thus we find them effectually protected from dislocation by the locking in above and below of the articular processes, and by the close investment of the capsular ligaments. The direction of the surfaces of these processes, and the shape and length

of the spinous processes, are such as to allow of free lateral flexion, but to limit the vertical and longitudinal motions; and whatever degree of freedom of motion may exist between the adjoining vertebra, that motion being multiplied along the column, the flexibility of the whole becomes very great, and admits of its assuming every degree and variety of curvature. The presence of a sternum, restraining the motions of the ribs, would have impeded all these movements, and would have also been an insurmountable bar to the dilatation of the stomach, which is rendered necessary by the habit of the serpent of gorging its prey entire."

In the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Lincoln's Inn Fields, is a very fine skeleton of the tiger boa, in which the above ball-and-socket apparatus can be examined. It measures eleven feet two inches, and has no less than two hundred and