Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, April 1899: Volume LIV, No. 6, April 1899
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
A peculiarity of Old English literary usage is pointed out by Prof.
Dr. L. Kellner, of Vienna, as illustrated in a sentence like "the mob
is ignorant, and they are often cruel." This is considered a bad
solecism in modern English, but in Old and Middle English
constructions of exactly the same kind are so often met with that it
is impossible to account for them as slips and mistakes. They may be
brought under several heads, as, Number (the same collective noun used
as a singular and a plural); Case (the same verb or adjective
governing the genitive and accusative, the genitive and dative, or the
dative and accusative); Pronoun ("thou" and "ye" used in addressing
the same person); Tense (past and perfect, or past and historical
present used in the same breath); Mood (indicative and subjunctive
used in the same clause). Finite verb and infinitive dependent on the
same verb; simple and prepositional infinitives dependent on the same
verb; infinitive and verbal noun used side by side; different
prepositions dependent on the same verb, like Caxton's "He was eaten
by bears and of lions"; direct and indirect speech alternating in the
same clause. These facts, which are met with as late as 1611 (Bible,
authorized version), point to the conclusion that what to us appears
as a grammatical inconsistency was once considered a welcome break in
the monotony of construction.
Mr. Fischer Sigwart is quoted in the _Revue Scientifique_ as having
studied the life of frogs for thirty years, and found that they are
night wanderers, keeping comparatively quiet during the day and
seeking their prey after dark. In the fall they leave their hunting
grounds in the fields and woods and take refuge near swamps and ponds,
passing the winter in the banks of rivers or the mud in the bottoms of
ponds, whence they come out in the spring, when the process of
reproduction begins. The frog is not sexually mature till it is four
or five years old. The coupling process lasts from three to thirty
days. Between its spring wakening and spawning the frog eats nothing
except, perhaps, its own skin, which it moults periodically. After
spawning, frogs leave the water and go to the fields and woods. They
can be fed, when kept captive, upon insects and earthworms.
NOTES.
A relation has been discovered by Professor Dolbear and Carl A. and
Edward A. Bessey between the chirping of crickets and the temperature,
the chirps increasing as frequently as the temperature rises. The
Besseys relate, in The American Naturalist, that when, one cool
evening, a cricket was caught and brought into a warm room, it began
in a few minutes to chirp nearly twice as rapidly as the out-of-door
crickets, and that its rate very nearly conformed to the observed rate
maintained other evenings out of doors under the same temperature
conditions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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