WATCHING EGGS HATCH.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1553, 7 September 1886, Page 3

WATCHING EGGS HATCH.

It was Oscar Vvilde, wasn’t i< 1 marked yesterday a gentleman who had •just returned from Europe, who said of a dead girl in one of his poems thai she can hear the daisies grow 1 Well, you needn’t call that a flight of poetic fancy any longer. I can triumph it iu real life. How so ? By seeing an egg hatch. Oh, come off! . No, it’s a fact. I don’t mean looking at the egg as it lies in the nest and just seeing the shell, but I mean seeing the inside of it and watching the gradual development of the chick from a globule of egg-yolk to a lively, downy, chirping fowl, ready to go out and forage for worms. It was over at Tubingen University, Germany, that I saw it. Great fellows for research those Gmman professors. This one was Dr Gerlach, who seems to have given himself up to investigating the growth of life. And now he’s sitting up nights watching eggs turn into chickens. How does he do it 1 I’ll tell yon. He takes a fesh egg, and cuts a bit of shell out of the little end. He chooses that endr 8 o as not to disturb the air bubble at the big end. The bit of shell ,be cuts out is as big as a nickel, and he takes it out just as a surgeon would " trepan a cracked skull. Then he can. see the inside of the egg as plain as can be. Betakes a little of the white out, just enough to turn the yolk around till the germ is where he can see it. Then he puts the white back very gently and seals it up. He has a little glass saucer very thin, big over as your thumb nail, and curved just like the bit of shell he cut out. r: He' puts this over the whole, being careful to let no air remain under it, and seals it on tight with collodion. And there you are. Tou can see everything inside the egg shell as plain as in a teacup. Put it in an incubator with a glass side, and you can watch the whole process of the growth .of the chick until he picks his way out of the shell. You can take it out of the incubator now and again and examine it as closely as you please. And 1 believe Dr Gerlach is now preparing a set of photograghs of the interior of the egg, one taken every hour from the time the egg was pul in the incubator to the hopping out of the hatched chick. Now talk about heating daises grow !—N.Y. Tribune, June 20th.