matter immediately retired, stalked away to the pool, filled his trunk full of muddy water, and, returning to the shop, overwhelmed the artisan and his doublet with the dirty effects of his vengeance."

66

DR JOHNSON ALLUDED TO AS AN ELEPHANT."

"If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy, ungraceful animal." This was written by Horace Walpole to Miss Berry, in 1791, in allusion to Dr Johnson's depreciation of Thomas Gray the poet.* It is an acute observation, well worth being wrought out. There is a grandeur and even a grace about this bulky beast and its motions well deserving the study of any one who has the opportunity. Elephants in our streets are not now so rare as they used to be. We saw three in one procession in the streets of Edinburgh in 1865.

ELEPHANT'S SKIN.

"Did any of you ever see an elephant's skin?" asked the master of an infant school in a fast neighbourhood. “I have!” shouted a six-year-old at the foot of the class. "Where?" inquired the master, amused by his earnestness. "On the elephant!" was the reply.

FOSSIL PACHYDERMATA.

CUVIER AND THE FOSSIL.

George Cuvier was perhaps the first man who, by his

"Letters of Horace Walpole," edited by Peter Cunningham, ix., 319.

admirable works and researches, gave zoology its true place among the sciences.

His discoveries of the structure of molluscous and other animals of the obscurer orders are perhaps eclipsed by his researches in osteology. He has enabled the comparative anatomist to tell from a small portion of bone not only the class, but the order, genus, and even the species to which animal that bone belonged.

Mrs Lee, in her Life of the Baron, gives an example of his enthusiasm in his researches.

M. Laurillard was afterwards his secretary and the draftsman who executed nearly all the drawings in his "Ossemens fossiles." At the time of this story he had not particularly attracted Cuvier's notice.

"One day Cuvier came to his brother Frederic to ask him to disengage a fossil from its surrounding mass, an office he had frequently performed. M. Laurillard was applied to in the absence of F. Cuvier. Little aware of the value of the specimen confided to his care, he cheerfully set to work, and succeeded in getting the bone entire from its position. M. Cuvier, after a short time, returned for his treasure, and when he saw how perfect it was, his ecstasies became incontrollable; he danced, he shook his hands, he uttered expressions of delight, till M. Laurillard, in his ignorance both of the importance of what he had done, and of the ardent character of M. Cuvier, thought he was mad. Taking, however, his fossil foot in one hand, and dragging Laurillard's arm with the other, he led him upstairs to present him to his wife and sister-in-law, saying, 'I

"Memoirs of Baron Cuvier," by Mrs R. Lee (formerly Mrs T. Ed. Bowdich), 1833, p. 93.

have got my foot, and M. Laurillard found it for me.' It seems that this skilful operation confirmed all M. Cuvier's previous conjecture concerning a foot, the existence and form of which he had already guessed, but for which he had long and vainly sought. So occupied had he been by it, that, when he appeared to be particularly absent, his family were wont to accuse him of seeking his fore-foot. The next morning the able operator and draftsman was engaged as secretary."

SOW.

A VERY gross but useful animal, which can, by feeding, be stuffed into such a state of fatness as only one who has seen a Christmas cattle show in England could believe it possible for beast to acquire. Dean Ramsay, in a happy anecdote, refers to a good quality of the sow as food. He tells, that a Scottish minister had been persuaded to keep a pig, and that the good wife had been duly instructed in the mysteries of black-puddings, pork-chops, pig's-head, and other modes of turning poor piggy to account. The minister remarked to a friend, "Nae doubt there's a hantle o' miscellaneous eating aboot a pig." The author of "A Ramble," published by Edmonstone and Douglas in 1865, has devoted some most amusing pages of his work to an account of "Pig-sticking in Chicago," as witnessed by him during the late American war. The wholesale and scientific off-hand way in which living pigs enter into one part of a machine, and come out prepared pork, could only have been devised by a Yankee.

The essay of Charles Lamb on Roast Pig, and his his