“Its size and manner of flight is like that of the smallest kind of hawk, which generally disappears during the season in which the cuckoo is seen. But they have both been seen at the same time, and the cuckoo was being devoured by the hawk, though this is never done by birds of the same kind. They say that no one has ever seen the young of the cuckoo. It does, however, lay eggs, but it makes no nest, but sometimes it lays its eggs in the nests of small birds, and devours their eggs, especially in the nests of the pigeon (when it has eaten their eggs). Sometimes it lays two, but usually only one egg; it lays also in the nest of the hypolais,[4] which hatches and brings it up. At this season it is particularly fat and sweet-fleshed; the flesh also of young hawks is very sweet and fat. There is also a kind of them which builds a nest in precipitous cliffs.” This morsel, our readers must consider, is not a very characteristic specimen of the feast that, take all his works together, Aristotle spreads for his students. But it is as toothsome as any we could offer. If it makes our readers wish for more, that is as friendly a feeling as we could possibly hope to inspire in them toward Aristotle. We shall now let them, in that mood, bid the great philosopher farewell. HOME STUDIES IN CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS. BY PROF. J. T. EDWARDS, D.D. Director of the Chautauqua School of Experimental Science. CHEMISTRY OF EARTH. John B. Gough declares that a few kind words spoken to him, in a crisis of his life, saved him from ruin. He afterward carefully educated the orphan daughters of the gentleman who uttered those words. “Why,” you say, “it was a little thing.” “Yes, _little_ for him, but a big thing for me.” [Illustration: CRYSTALS OF ALUM.] The importance of _many_ things depends upon the point of observation. To a hypothetical astronomer on a distant star, this world would be too minute for observation. In that shining pathway of the heavens, called the “milky way,” there have been discovered eighteen millions of stars, each hundreds of times larger than our earth; yet _our_ atom in immensity is, just now, of marvelous interest to us. Indeed, it must be of interest to the highest intelligences, for such are the harmonies of God’s universe that the minutest planet is in many of its forces and laws representative of the whole. So that our world is, in a sense, both a microcosm and a cosmo. Let us briefly consider some characteristics of the earth, from the standpoint of the chemist. All substances have been divided into two great classes, the inorganic and organic. The latter contains two subdivisions—the vegetable and animal world. Nature thus comprises three great sub-kingdoms, the mineral, vegetable and animal.