"PWDRE SER."
271
it fast by the neck, carry it off, and devour it in the air. When
searching for grasshoppers and caterpillars, it is not difficult to
approach them under cover of a fence or tree. When one is then
killed and falls to the ground, the whole flock comes over the
dead bird, as if intent upon carrying it off."
"PWDRE SER."
By H. A. BAYLIS, M.A., D.Sc., Department of Zoology, British Museum (Natural History).
(With One Plate.)
A WHITISH, jelly-like substance is not infrequently found
lying on the ground, more particularly in open, grassy
spaces, which has given rise to a great deal of speculation. It
occurs in masses which are sometimes as large as a fist. Popular
legend has for centuries connected it with meteorites or "shoot-
ing-stars," and there are numerous references to it in literature,
several of which are quoted in an interesting article on the
subject by Professor T. McKenny Hughes, in Nature (June 23,
1910). Some of the passages referring to it will bear repetition
here. For example, Suckling (1541) says:
"As he whose quicker eye doth trace
A false star shot to a markt place
Do's run apace,
And, thinking it to catch,
A jelly up do snatch."
Henry More (1656) has the following passage:
"That the Starres eat . . . that those falling Starres, as
some call them, which are found on the earth in the form of a trembling
gelly, are their excrement."
William Somerville (1740) says :
" And like that falling Meteor, there she lyes
A jelly cold on earth."
Robert Boyle (1744) speaks of "that jelly, that is sometimes
found on the ground, and by the vulgar called a star-shoot,"
which, he says, when kept in a "well-stopt glass" until it lique-
fied, was extolled by an eminent physician of his acquaintance
"as a specific to be outwardly applied against Wens."
It is clear that the idea of some connection between the
"jelly" and meteoric phenomena was widespread in the 16th
to 18th centuries, and Professor Hughes shows that this idea