plish gray. Some of its habits are very extraordinary, while no doubt it has many others as yet unknown. Captivity is but illy borne by it, and it soon perishes in that state, and indeed it is said the species is on the highroad to extinction in its native land. No doubt this will be effected even before we are fully acquainted with all its habits and ways, and man will be responsible for sweeping off the face of the earth forever one of the loveliest forms that has ever graced it or ever will. Dismal indeed will be the forests and Nature's wilds when each and all such graceful creatures, such forms of life and beauty, are completely exterminated. Such work is going on in every quarter of the globe as I pen these lines, and with very marked rapidity. Still, this is but fate and the natural order of things; and we must believe that in the centuries to come the Earth will see the day when man's descendants will be her only inhabitants, with perhaps the merest remnant of any other forms of vertebrate life, and these completely subjected to his will and sway. How much the more,then, does it devolve upon us to fully record in all particulars the biology of those forms now in existence in our midst, and especially those types, the outliers—the connecting links—in all departments of Nature so essential to its understanding, and in order that our heirs and descendants may the more completely comprehend the history of the origin of organic life upon the face of the globe and the manifold mysteries of its evolution.
M. Moissan has found, in his electrical furnace, that quite as distinct chemical actions go on in molten cast iron as those with which the chemist has long been familiar in aqueous solutions at ordinary temperatures. The actions are often very complex, because of the faculty which iron has of retaining many compounds as impurities. The author has precipitated carbon and carbide of iron in fusions by means of boron and silicon; all these substances behaving in the liquid iron precisely as the substances with which we deal in a similar manner behave in water.