We publish with pleasure the following note from the Rev. G. H. Houghton, D.D., rector of the Church of the Transfiguration:
To the Editor of Harper's Young People:
You were kind enough to print in your number of July 26 a letter in which it was proposed that some of your young readers should unite in endowing or supporting a cot in St. Mary's Free Hospital.
Connected with the Church of the Transfiguration, of which I am rector, there is a society known as the Holy Innocents' Guild. This guild has for its object the care of poor sick children, and has furnished within the past year a ward, called the Holy Innocents' Ward, in St. Mary's Hospital, 407 West Thirty-fourth Street, New York, where such children can have the kind nursing care of the good Sisters of St. Mary. It is a cot in this ward that it is proposed that some of your young readers should unite in endowing or supporting. The endowing of a cot, which will provide for the care of a sick child for all time to come, will cost three thousand dollars. The support of a cot for a year will cost two hundred dollars.
This statement, if you will print it, will enable all who may contribute to do so more intelligently.
G. H. Houghton,
New York, August 22, 1881.
Washington, D. C.
I have taken Young People from the first number, and have found a great deal to interest me in its pages. My favorite pursuit is the study of natural history, and I have made a fair collection of insects, minerals, and shells since coming to this city about three years ago. I began by collecting insects, among which I have the following: a polyphemus moth six inches across the wings, a turnus or tiger swallow-tail butterfly, a large hawk-moth, an Archippus butterfly, Ajax and Asterias butterflies, a hummingbird moth, and several cicadas. I have some specimens of the Mantis religiosa, or, as the people here call them, the "rear-horse bug," because they rear like horses when disturbed. This praying mantis is a curious insect, and quite voracious, feeding on flies and other insects. My first collection, which contained a variety of dragon-flies, was destroyed by mites. I now have my second, as well as a collection of spiders.
I have explored the District of Columbia thoroughly for geological specimens. My cabinet now includes rough garnets, petrified wood, fossilized shells imbedded in stone, crystals, and iron pyrites. I have a microscope, which affords me many hours of amusement. I have examined water-fleas, the bell-flower animalculæ, and that miniature octopus the hydra.
I have had an aquarium, in which the fish were so tame that they would eat from my hand. I have raised toads and frogs and catfish from the spawn. I kept a nest of ants for a year in a glass jar, and diligently studied their habits. I once put a quantity of powdered cracker near their jar, and after they had discovered it, and were conveying it home, I placed some sugar near it; but although they observed the sugar, they finished carrying the cracker away before they touched the other, though they love sugar. Ants, as I have read, have their games, beasts of burden, and plans of defense and assault, marching in columns like armies, and they undoubtedly possess intelligence of a very high degree. I once tried to tame a large gray and black spider, but did not succeed. I found a small paper-making wasps' nest, and pinned it up in my room shortly after coming to Washington. One day a small wasp with black wings and red body flew in at the window. No doubt she was out house-hunting, for on perceiving my wasps' nest, she took possession, selected a cell, and deposited an egg in it. After this she flew away, but soon returned, carrying a small gray spider, placed it beside the egg, and sealed up the recess with some yellow mud. She then went in search of another spider, which she also placed in the same cell, but without laying another egg in the second compartment. Then she began on another cell. There were seventy cells in the nest, and it was curious to see a mud-wasp at work in a paper-wasps' nest.
There are many facilities for study in Washington. Here are the Botanical Gardens, the National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Agricultural Museum and Conservatory. There are several minor museums, and the Congressional Library. Washington is, in fact, an excellent school to an observing person.
John B. T.
Fort Dodge, Iowa.
Last year I had Young People for my birthday present. To-day I am six years old, and have had given me a knife with a whistle attached, and a pretty plate to eat ice-cream from. Mamma says it is pleasant to give things on birthdays as well as to receive them, so I am going to send ten cents for the "Young People's Cot," and when I go to New York again, I hope to visit the hospital, and see the cot. I live on the Des Moines River, but I was born in Connecticut. Mamma reads everything in Young People to me, but I hope soon to be able to read it myself.