—Vaccine Institut. Report.
China.
A valuable museum of the products of Chinese skill and industry has recently been exhibited at Rome, in which the progress made by a people of whom so little is known, and civilization and the arts, is demonstrated. The manufacture of bronzes, porcelain, gold work, and casts in copper, has arrived in China at an approach to perfection which the most advanced European nations would find it difficult to surpass. Some of the Chinese vases may really be compared to those of the finest time of Greece. The sculptures and the paintings, even with reference to anatomical precision, are as highly finished as ours.
—Literary Gazette.
Recovery from Suspended Animation.
A case is reported in a recent number of the Bulletin Universel, by a French physician, M. Bourgeois, showing the importance of never abandoning all hope of success in restoring animation. A person who had been twenty minutes under water, was treated in the usual way for the space of half an hour without success: when a ligature being applied to the arm, above a vein that had been previously opened, ten ounces of blood were withdrawn, after which the circulation and respiration gradually returned, though accompanied by the most dreadful convulsions. A second, and a third bleeding was had recourse to, which brought about a favourable sleep, and ultimate recovery on the ensuing day.
Iron.
It is a singular fact, that the value of the iron annually produced in England greatly exceeds the value of the silver annually produced in Peru.
Hair.
At a recent meeting of the Academy of Sciences, at Paris, M. F. Cuvier, in a memoir on the generation of feathers, spines, and hair, introduced the following curious conclusion:—"I consider the organic system which produces hair as analogous to that of the senses, and even as forming part of them; for the hair is in a great number of animals a very sensitive organ of touch. It is not only in mustaches that we have a proof of it, but on the whole surface of the body. The slightest touch of a hair is sufficient in cats, for example, to make them contort their skin and shudder, as they do when they find something light attached to the hair, and that they wish to shake off."