THE NATURALIST

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1424, 15 June 1899, Page 13

THE NATURALIST

AN AGGRAVATING BOOKING CLERK

The ” Windsor Magazine” revives a good story of an amusing altercation which once tooke place between Mr Frank Buckland and a booking-clerk. The naturalist had been in France, and was returning via Southampton with an overcoat stuffed with specimens of all sorts, dead and alive. Among them was a monkey, which was domiciled in a large breast pocket. As Buckland was taking his ticket, Joko thrust up his head, and attracted the attention of the booking-clerk, who immediately—and very properly—said, “ You must have a ticket ior that dog, if it's going with you.” “Dog?” said Buckland, indignantly; " it’s no dog, it’s a monkey.” ” It’s a dog,” replied the clerk. " It’s a monkey,” retorted Buckland, and proceeded to show the whole animal, but without convincing the clerk, who insisted on live shillings for the dog ticket to London. Naturally neHled at this, Buckland plunged his band into another pocket, and produced a tortoise, and, laying it on the sill of the ticket window, said, " Perhaps you’ll call that a dog, too ” t> The clerk inspected the tortoise. " No, he said, “ we make no charge on them—they’re insects.” There is another version of the same story, in which the railway official lays it down that for the purpose of classification, "cats is dogs and rabbits is dogs, but this here tortoise is a hinsect, and there ain’t no extra charge.” DEVOURED BY A FUNGUS. "In August last I sought out a large number of working plans and working details of scientific research, work 1 have done during the last ten years, with the intention of tabulating the same prior to bringing them before the scientific world. I put them all into a large box I got for the purpose from the grocer. Before using the box I brushed it thoroughly out .and put it out in the sun in the garden for two bright days. Then I kept it in the kitchen beside the fire for fourteen hours. Thinking all was sate enough, I placed my drawings in it, and there they remained till the other week, when I was about to begin a very serious task (for it meant a deal of work). But, alas! what was my surprise and astonishment on opening the box to find it full to the lid with a snow-white fungus. My wife thought it was a box full of wadding. " After removing several handfuls I came on the rolls, but none of them would unwind. The fungus had crept into every turn of the coils and destroyed the very structure of the paper. Varnished drawings, mounted on cloth and wooden rollers, ■crumbled away between the fingers, and the wood snapped like pith. Tracing paper, used and unused, suffered the same as ordinary drawing paper, but a few pieces <of tracing cloth escaped disintegration, but were rendered useless through stains all round them. I tried all I could think of to save my. ten years’ work, but it would yield to nothing. The box had remained undisturbed under the window on my laboratory floor for several months, and, •strange to say, another box of similar size and kind lies within six inches of it, and filled with papers of minor importance, yet it has escaped and is untouched with fungus. I have not yet examined the fungus microscopically, but hope by doing so to ascertain the name of the ■organism, and under what conditions it lives.”