A Java correspondent of our contemporary, _Nature_, relates a curious instance of cannibalism among snakes which came under his notice. He had killed close to his house a snake of very deadly character. Upon examining it some time later he found, protruding from its mouth, the tail of another snake, which eventually turned out to be of the same species and only a few inches shorter than its host. The natives of the place gave it as their opinion that the two creatures had been fighting, and that the victor had swallowed the vanquished. Another correspondent of the same journal tells of a similar case which he saw in India.
It deserves to be placed on record that the University of London have for the first time conferred the high degree of D.Sc. upon a lady. Mrs Sophia Bryant, by whom this honour has been achieved, is the daughter of the Rev. Dr Willock, late rector of Cleenish, Enniskillen, and Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin. Mrs Bryant has for some time held the position of mathematical mistress at the North London Collegiate School for Girls.
An interesting article upon a very curious subject is contributed by M. C. E. Brown-Sequard to the French journal _La Nature_. This article takes for its title ‘Attitudes after Death,’ and deals with the numerous instances, on the field of battle and in other situations, where dead bodies have been found—sitting on horseback in one instance, raising a cup to the lips in another, transfixed in the position last assumed when sudden death came upon them. One case is very remarkable. A brakesman on an American railway was shot by a guerrilla, who lay in ambush in a forest through which the train passed. As he was shot, the unfortunate man was in the act of putting on the brake. His body remained fixed, his arms and hands stiff on the brake-wheel, whilst the pipe he was smoking remained between his teeth. It was extremely difficult to make the corpse let go its hold. The writer of the paper points out that this fixture of the body is quite different from the ordinary rigidity of death; and he believes that it depends upon the production of a persistent muscular action, like the fixed spasm often seen in hysterical or paralytic subjects. It is an act of life, but the last one.