It is known to sportsmen that in the neighbourhood of hills, partridges leave the low grounds at the approach of evening, and take themselves to the hilly or more elevated district. Nature has taught them a very curious fact in meteorology, namely, that on leaving the valley at night, and ascending the hill, the temperature of the air increases up to a certain elevation, and from that point upwards decreases. The game ascends to the point of highest temperature, and there remains for the evening. A friend informs me that whilst crossing the high range of mountains forming the watershed between the Grotevisch Rivière and the Zondag Rivière, in Southern Africa, he experienced as he ascended intense cold, with heavy dews in the valleys through which ran the sources of the Grotevisch Rivière, and these continued until he reached the base of the crowning heights. Here the party slept in a mud-hut belonging to a Dutch boer. During the ascent they saw no game; but on climbing about half way up the remaining steep before daybreak next morning, they reached a spot where all the large game had congregated. It was the point of greatest warmth, generally a few hundred feet above the plain, and below the summit of the mountain. From this point to the summit the cold was most intense, and snow lay on the high peaks of the mountains. When the shells of infusoria are driven about in the atmosphere they lose their carbonate of lime by the acid fermentation; and the membranous portions having the properties of coagulated albumen, and being also fermentable, may, by passing into the blood, become excitants of fermentation. This has been already fully explained in the text.[75] [75] It is mentioned in the Report on the Wine Disease in Portugal, that the _oidium_ was first discovered at Margate; if this was the case, might it not have originated from the phosphorescent beings in sea water, observed by all travellers in the evening on the coasts of Flanders, and known in Holland as Zee Vlam? The potato disease is thought by some to have sprung from the same cause. NOTE 3.--_Moss._ In the _Annales de Chimie_, volume xxix. p. 225, mention is made that the walls of various towns which had been under water for several years having become exposed, from the effects of a dry summer and hot weather, became covered with vegetable matter, the decomposition of which infected the atmosphere, and caused great sickness in the environs, and particularly where buildings were situated in marshes in communication with the sea. The vegetation, in fact, was composed of lichens.