The Masnavi, passage 48

So persistent was he in patrolling Leafy Lawn, jumping from tree to tree and from branch to branch, reporting his presence, and in case of danger threatening, squawking so loudly and repeatedly, that it was agreed, as he already had a blue uniform, that he should be the policeman for this precinct.

The Masnavi, passage 47

A few days after the arrival of the Woodpeckers, Robin saw Mr. Blue Jay making a circuitous route to the tall pine and he knew the Jays had located there. Though Mr. Blue Jay was always cautious, trying to deceive every one concerning the whereabouts of his home, he himself knew every other nest in the yard.

The Masnavi, passage 150

The Wapiti is closely related and belongs to the same genus as the famous stag or red deer (Cervus elaphus) of Europe. This animal, which is smaller than the Wapiti, inhabits the forests of mountainous regions.

The Masnavi, passage 221

Hops is used medicinally. It at first causes a very slight excitation of brain and heart, followed by a rather pronounced disposition to sleep. Pillows stuffed with hops form a very popular domestic remedy for wakefulness. Hop bags dipped in hot water form a very soothing external application in painful inflammatory conditions, especially of the abdominal organs. It has undoubted value as a bitter tonic in dyspepsia and in undue cerebral excitation. Tincture of lupulin and red pepper (capsicum) enjoys the reputation of being a very efficient substitute for alcoholic stimulants when their use is to be discontinued. Earlier physicians recommended hops very highly in kidney and liver complaints, as a “blood purifier” and to cure eruptive skin troubles. It is recommended in nervous troubles and in delirium tremens. The roots were formerly employed as a substitute for sarsaparilla.

The Masnavi, passage 116

Rob went home delighted. “I’ll make a collection of bugs, as Sam Ward does of butterflies,” he declared.

The Masnavi, passage 162

Often a tree will have a countless number of buds; and since growing buds need much light and nourishment only the stronger ones will grow, the weaker ones remaining in a resting state. These resting buds are called dormant buds, the word dormant coming from the Latin word “dormio,” which means “to sleep.” The buds often continue in this dormant state for several years, becoming weaker and weaker all the time, until finally they die. If, however, the stronger buds are killed at any time, as by a late frost, the dormant ones suddenly become active, and grow to take the place of the ones that were destroyed. This shows us how cleverly trees provide substitutes for cases of emergency. These dormant buds then might even be compared to the understudies of the stage.

The Masnavi, passage 220

The principal use of hops is in the manufacture of beer, to which it imparts the peculiarly bitter taste, and its repute as a tonic. For this purpose enormous quantities are consumed in Germany and England. The exhausted hops from the breweries form an excellent fertilizer for light soils. The leaves have been used as fodder for cows. Leaves, stems and roots possess astringent properties and have been used in tanning. In Sweden the fibre of the stems is used in manufacturing a very durable white cloth, not unlike the cloth made from hemp and flax.

The Masnavi, passage 20

All of thy wanderings, far and near, Bring thee at last to shore and me; All of my journeyings end them here, This our tether must be our cheer,— I on the shore and thou on the sea.

The Masnavi, passage 92

Who are the opponents of the doctrine of Evolution? In the scientific world they are difficult to find. Professor Virchow, of Berlin, the distinguished pathologist must, I think, be classed as one, although his verdict is really “not proven.” Professor Haeckel, however, has pointed out that the opinion of a pathologist, no matter how eminent, upon the subject of evolution cannot carry much weight.

The Masnavi, passage 224

INDEX. Volume IX—January, 1901, to May, 1901, Inclusive.

The Masnavi, passage 115

“Just put a layer of pyrethrum in the bottom of your bottle,” answered the druggist, “keep it corked tight, and you can make every bug in your yard die happy. Pyrethrum is a powder that is harmless to people (though of course you must not eat it), but the least smell of it kills insects.”

The Masnavi, passage 127

“No, they won’t; I’ll take my red chair out and sit on it, like Rob does,” he answered, solemnly.

The Masnavi, passage 187

THE TRAILING ARBUTUS. (_Epigaea repens._)

The Masnavi, passage 89

When we remember that some wild animals will not breed in captivity, the idea of sterility as a test of species seems utterly unscientific. I venture to say that there can be no accurate definition of species in terms of physiology, for every individual has its peculiarities, chemical as well as physical, and the real difficulty is to decide when these peculiarities are important enough to make it useful to give a precise name to their possessors. Assume for a moment that a species is a group of individuals agreeing in essential characters which remain constant from one generation to another. But what are essential characters and how much constancy is demonstrated? Upon these points no two biologists are likely to agree. For example, taking the birds of Germany, Bechstein says there are 367 species; Brehm says there are 900. According to Reichenbach there are 379, and Meyer and Wolf tell us there are 406.

The Masnavi, passage 240

R Rabbit’s Cream [Poem] (Hattie Whitney), 37

The Masnavi, passage 105

Dr. Coues, speaking of these birds as he observed them in Labrador, says, “They are tough birds and remarkably tenacious of life and require a heavy charge to kill them. They are known as Bottle-nosed Coots, a name given in allusion to the very peculiar shape and color of the bill.”

The Masnavi, passage 58

Many a time, however, he would sit upon the corner of the house roof and perpetrate his joke on the boy in the hammock below, who thought he knew much about birds, but who could not understand why, when he heard so many different voices, there was only a little gray cat-bird within sight.

The Masnavi, passage 50

“My wife,” said Robin, “awakened me from the twig near her nest, where I usually sleep and keep guard, and she said that one of our kin had arrived for she had heard a voice exactly like mine from the plum tree. Hoping it was one of my brothers I searched eagerly until sunrise, and though I heard him twice I could not find him.”

The Masnavi, passage 180

That the octopus is good eating the writer can attest from experience, for during a visit to Yucatan some years ago this mollusk was served as a meat dish and was very palatable, the flesh being firm and tender and much resembling chicken. The portion which fell to the writer was the head, with a part of the arms attached.

The Masnavi, passage 77

Innumerable hosts of life made their appearance upon our planet while the surface was going through the cooling process, and they were, at first, of course, of the most primitive kind. But the same laws were always at work, viz., no two living things were exactly alike when they made their appearance upon this earth, although the differences between several forms might be very slight. Variation was, and is, the order of the day.

The Masnavi, passage 30

—I behold The godwits running by the water edge, The mossy bridges mirrored as of old; The little curlews creeping from the sedge. —Jean Ingelow, “The Four Bridges.”

The Masnavi, passage 193

As a rule, the pollen bearing flowers are larger and whiter than the others. The stigma bearing blossoms, while small, more than offset their defect by a rosy color which makes the flowers far more attractive than their larger but paler rivals.

The Masnavi, passage 34

The Marbled Godwit belongs to a genus (Limosa) which, though not rich in the number of species, has representatives throughout the Northern Hemisphere. This bird frequents muddy pools and marshes and wet, sandy shores. It is this habit that suggested to the naturalist the generic name, which is derived from the Latin word limosus, meaning muddy.

The Masnavi, passage 124

“The ant-hill’s mine! I ’scovered it!” he announced at supper one evening. “I’ll make a fence wound it to keep the wolves out, and I’ll have the ants for my sheepses.”

The Masnavi, passage 103

The note of the Surf Scoter is to me the most pleasing of all the ducks. It is a soft, mellow whistle ending in a cluck! cluck!

The Masnavi, passage 99

Our illustration is that of a male bird. The female is a sooty brown, silvery gray below and with much white on the sides of the head.

The Masnavi, passage 120

“This you may have for a specimen case,” she said. “If you’ll fit some little drawers in it, Rob, I’ll line them with scraps of velvet and have a glass top put on.”

The Masnavi, passage 114

But this was not such an easy matter. Mr. Bug would not touch any of the back-yard “vegetables,” as Rob called the variety of weeds that clung to the rotten fence boards or matted the ground of the large garden. In spite of their efforts the bug stuck to the corner of the bottle and refused to be comforted, with food, at least. At last, in despair, Rob ran to the drug store and asked what he could give the bug to “make it die a peaceful death.”

The Masnavi, passage 130

“The ants find their drink away down in the ground, dear,” replied his mother. “Now tell me what you have learned about your sheep.”

The Masnavi, passage 177

A mollusk whose shell is cast upon the shore by thousands, but the animal of which is very rare, is the Spirula. The shell is less than an inch in diameter, is made in the form of a loose spiral and is divided into little chambers connected by a siphuncle. The shell of this genus does not contain the animal, as in Nautilus, but it is enveloped in two flaps of the mantle, at the posterior part of the animal, the shell being concealed with the exception of a part of the edge on each side. The body of the animal is long and cylindrical and the arms are quite short, more nearly resembling those of the Nautilus than those of the Octopus or squid. The body ends in a disk which is supposed to be a kind of sucker, by which the animal can adhere to rocks, thus enabling it to freely use its arms in obtaining food. It has been supposed by some anatomists that the shells of the fossil Ammonites were attached to the animal in a similar manner, and if this should be true these small mollusks would assume a new meaning as being the last survivors of a large group of animals of which all except Spirula are extinct.

The Masnavi, passage 235

L Laurel, The Mountain [Illustration], 232 Lemon, The [Illustration] (Charles S. Raddin), 182 Lizard, The Collared [Illustration], 35 Lower Animals, Some Things We Might Learn from the (Rowland Watts), 60

The Masnavi, passage 185

A familiar object to most canary-bird fanciers is the cuttle-bone placed in the cages of these birds for them to sharpen their beaks upon. This “cuttle-bone” is the internal support of the Cuttle-fish (Sepia officinalis) and is homologous with the pen of the squid, mentioned above. The animal of Sepia is short and rounded, with a large head surrounded by a row of eight short arms and two very long tentacular arms, ending in expanded clubs armed with powerful suckers. Like the Octopus and Squid, the Cuttle-fish is capable of many changes of colors by the contraction and expansion of its pigment cells. They are found throughout the world, living near the shore, but the species found about European shores are the best known.

The Masnavi, passage 206

“All the Kalmias resort to a most ingenious device for compelling insect visitors to carry their pollen from blossom to blossom. A newly opened flower has its stigma erected where the incoming bee must leave on its sticky surface the four minute orange-like grains carried from the anther of another flower on the hairy underside of her body. Now, each anther is tucked away in one of the ten little pockets of the saucer-shaped blossom and the elastic filaments are strained upward like a bow. After hovering above the nectary, the bee has only to descend towards it, when her leg, touching against one of the hair-triggers of the spring trap, pop! goes the little anther-gun, discharging pollen from its bores as it flies upward. So delicately is the mechanism adjusted, the slightest jar or rough handling releases the anthers; but, on the other hand, should insects be excluded by a net stretched over the plant, the flowers will fall off and wither without firing off their pollen-charged guns. At least this is true in the great majority of tests. As in the case of hot-house flowers, no fertile seed is set when nets keep away the laurel’s benefactors.”

The Masnavi, passage 148

In these early times the Wapiti or the American Elk, as it is commonly though erroneously called, was probably the most widely distributed quadruped in North America. Its range extended from the northern part of Mexico northward to Hudson’s Bay and from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. At the present time, however, but a few wild individuals are left in the United States east of the Mississippi and lower Missouri Rivers. They are occasionally met with in the wilder regions bordering Lake Superior, and it is reported that they are still living in the mountainous regions of Pennsylvania and Virginia. The advance of civilization, causing the cultivation of the lands and the destruction of the forests, has gradually driven this noble animal to the westward and into the wilds of British America. In the states bordering the Pacific Ocean and along the western tributaries of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers it is still quite common. One writer tells us that “in the rich pasture lands of the San Joaquin and Sacramento it formerly was to be seen in immense droves and with the antelope, the black-tailed deer, the wild cattle and mustangs covered those plains with herds rivalling those of the bison east of the mountains or of the antelope in South Africa.”

The Masnavi, passage 223

Never yet was a springtime, Late though lingered the snow, That the sap stirred not at the whisper Of the south wind sweet and low; Never yet was a springtime When the buds forgot to blow. —Margaret E. Sangster.

The Masnavi, passage 214

It is rather remarkable that a plant so widely distributed and familiar should not have been known to the Greeks and Romans. Its cultivation in Europe dates back to the eighth and ninth centuries. It was, however, not extensively cultivated until about the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The Masnavi, passage 128

The next day he set to work to build a big circular fence around his ant hill, working as perseveringly as ever any real shepherd did to get his fold ready, and accepting no help from Rob except allowing him to shave up a board to furnish the “palings.” Then, day after day, while Lora swung in the hammock reading aloud to Rob, little Jim sat perched on his red chair herding his ant-flock.

The Masnavi, passage 6

AUDUBON’S ORIOLE. (_Icterus audubonii_.)

The Masnavi, passage 139

“Look here,” said Lora, drawing him up to the sofa beside her. “This is the picture of the inside of an ant-hill. Here is the top door where you see the ants go in, then they go down to this large room, then sideways to this one, then down, down, down.”

The Masnavi, passage 210

HOPS. (_Humulus lupulus L._)

The Masnavi, passage 72

“An integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent heterogeneity, to a definite, coherent homogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.” Anybody who will think about this definition will be able to appreciate its meaning, provided a good dictionary is at hand.

The Masnavi, passage 236

M March [Poem] (Walter Thornbury), 144 May [Poem] (Walter Thornbury), 193 Mrs. Jane’s Experiment (Mary Noland), 72 Murrelet, The Marbled [Illustration], 119

The Masnavi, passage 169

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul, As the swift seasons roll! Leave thy low-vaulted past! Let each new temple, nobler than the last, Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast, Till thou at length art free, Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea! —Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The Masnavi, passage 183

In Norway and Sweden the people have a legend of a peculiar sea-monster, called the Kraken, which was probably founded on some of the enormous squids discovered during the past thirty years. Many of these mollusks are found off the coasts of Norway, Scotland and Ireland, and not a few have been recorded from the coasts of Nova Scotia and New England. In the larger of these animals the body is eight or ten feet long, the short arms eight feet and the long, tentacular arms thirty feet in length, making in all an animal nearly forty feet long when fully stretched out! The squid is greatly prized as bait and frequently a royal battle will take place between one of these gigantic creatures and a boat’s crew. Sad indeed is the fate of the latter if the mollusk once gets a firm hold of the boat. Care is used, however, to guard against such a result, and the animal is gradually deprived of its strength by making a sudden dash, cutting off an arm and as quickly retreating. These large squids are not as common as the smaller ones and they are rarely captured.

The Masnavi, passage 136

“It won’t scare my specimens away,” laughed Lora. “I’ve been studying birds lately. You see when I become tired of reading I just lie back in the hammock and watch the birds in the tree-tops. They are so very smart, and they do the queerest things!”

The Masnavi, passage 102

As the tides enter San Diego Bay they carry in the loose seaweeds in which are entangled numerous dead starfish and other forms of marine life. These form the principal food not only of the Scoters but also of all the water fowls, such as other species of ducks, the cormorant, the pelican and the beautiful California gull.

The Masnavi, passage 218

In Belgium the young, tender tops of the plants are cut off in the spring and eaten like asparagus, especially recommended to the pale and anaemic and those with scrofulous taints.

The Masnavi, passage 172

While the shell of Nautilus is well known the animal is very rare in our museums, although the natives of the Fiji Islands, New Hebrides and New Caledonia are able to obtain it in large quantities for food and it is highly esteemed by them. During the voyage of H. M. S. Challenger around the world, a living Nautilus was captured by dredging in some three hundred and twenty fathoms near Mateeka Island, one of the Fiji group. This was placed in a tub and it swam about in a lively manner by ejecting water from its funnel. The tentacles, of which there are a larger number than in the other cephalopods, were spread out radially, like those of the sea anemone. The Nautilus lives among the coral reefs, at depths varying from three to three hundred fathoms or more.

The Masnavi, passage 226

B Back-Yard Class, A (Lee McCrae), 214 Bacteria, The Study of (Adolph Gehrmann), 6 Bear, The [Illustration], 122 Beaver, The [Illustration], 170 Before the Storm [Poem] (Mary Morrison), 119 Bird Calendar by the Poets, A (Arranged by Ella F. Mosby), 24 Bird Gossip, A Bit of (S. E. McKee), 115 Bird Incidents (Berton Mercer), 126 Bird-Joke at Leafy Lawn, A (Gertrude Southwick Kingsland), 202 Bird Notes [Poem] (Mary Hefferan), 85 Bird, The Autobiography of a (Caroline Crowinshield Bascom), 17 Bird, The Story (Belle P. Drury), 121 Birds, The Geographical Distribution of (Lynds Jones), 65 Blackbird or Grackle, The Rusty [Illustration], 204 Blackbird’s Song, The [Poem] (Walter Thornbury), 151 Black Bugs, The Story of Some (Louise Jamison), 12 Boy-Chickadee (Elizabeth Nunemacher), 120

The Masnavi, passage 186

God made all the creatures and gave them Our love and our fear, To give sign we and they are His children, One family here. —Robert Browning.