It may not be generally known that the tadpole acts the same part with fish that ants do with birds; and that through the agency of this little reptile, perfect skeletons, even of the smallest fishes may be obtained.  To produce this, it is but necessary to suspend the fish by threads attached to the head and tail in an horizontal position, in a jar of water, such as is found in a pond, and change it often, till the tadpoles have finished their work.  Two or three tadpoles will perfectly dissect a fish in twenty-four hours.

H.S.S.

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THREE ENTHUSIASTIC NATURALISTS.

The first is a learned entomologist, who, hearing one evening at the Linnean Society that a yellow Scarabaeus, otherwise beetle, of a very rare kind was to be captured on the sands at Swansea, immediately took his seat in the mail for that place, and brought back in triumph the object of his desire.  The second is Mr. David Douglas, who spent two years among the wild Indians of the Rocky Mountains, was reduced to such extremities as occasionally to sup upon the flaps of his saddle; and once, not having this resource, was obliged to eat up all the seeds he had collected the previous forty days in order to appease the cravings of nature.  Not appalled by these sufferings, he has returned again to endure similar hardships, and all for a few simples.  The third example is Mr. Drummond, the assistant botanist to Franklin in his last hyperborean journey.  In the midst of snow, with the thermometer 15 deg. below zero, without a tent, sheltered from the inclemency of the weather only by a hut built of the branches of trees, and depending for subsistence from day to day on a solitary Indian hunter, “I obtained,” says this amiable and enthusiastic botanist, “a few mosses; and, on Christmas day,”—­mark, gentle reader, the day, of all others, as if it were a reward for his devotion,—­“I had the pleasure of finding a very minute Gymnostomum, hitherto undescribed.  I remained alone for the rest of the winter, except when my man occasionally visited me with meat; and I found the time hang very heavy, as I had no books, and nothing could be done in the way of collecting specimens of natural history.”

Magazine of Natural History

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[Illustration:  BURIAL PLACE IN TONGATABU.]

This is another of Mr. Bennett’s sketches made during his recent visit to several of the Polynesian Islands.  It represents the burial-place of the Chiefs of Tongatabu:  over this “earthly prison of their bones,” we may say with Titus Andronicus: 

  In pence and honour rest you here my sons: 
  (The) readiest champions, repose you here,
  Secure from worldly chances and mishaps: 
  Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
  Here grow no damned grudges:  here are no storms,
  No noise, but silence and eternal sleep.