This man had worked as a _ranchero_ or stock herder for two years on one of these ranches, and had been obliged at one time to kill eleven cattle and seven sheep and goats in two weeks on account of their having rabies. It was part of his duty to follow up rabid coyotes, foxes, skunks, and wild cats when he saw them or heard their peculiar cry, and shoot them before they bit the stock. But he assured me very gravely that he preferred to work in the valley for less wages rather than have charge of Chollalito rancho; and when we camped there for a night he slept on top of the pack boxes, with his bare feet wrapped in blankets and a _serape_ over his head, and reverently pulled out the blessed rag he wore around his neck, in order to more surely protect himself against the rabid skunks and coyotes. There is, however, very little danger in traveling through this interesting country. Cases of hydrophobia are comparatively rare, and some scientists who have collected in Baja California have even denied its existence there. But with the traveler, as with the native, there remains the vague, constant, but unrealized expectation of seeing some raging coyote come tearing through the cactus, or of having his toe bitten in the middle of the night as he sprawls in the heat and darkness. * * * * * PROFESSOR WELLDON, in the British Association, expressed his sense of the intellectual insolence of those who presume to say, notwithstanding our ignorance of animal characters, that because a characteristic seems to us minute and without importance, it is therefore without importance to the animal. Until we know the function of the animal throughout, and can picture its physiological processes thoroughly, we have no right to say, _a priori_, that this or that feature is of no use. THE SENSE OF COLOR. BY M. ANDRÉ BRACCHI.