June 2.—Those who are familiar with the sights of Bronx Park, New York, know what a rocking stone is. For others, it may be explained that the term refers to boulder of decent size that has! been deposited, usually by glacial action, on the surface of rocky ground in such a way as to sway back and forth under the application of pressure from the wind or from a human hand, without toppling completely over. The phenomenon must obviously be a rare one, since the stone must possess sufficiently stable equilibrium to prevent it from keeling over entirely, yet be unstable enough to make motion possible. The Bronx rocking stone is an unusually heavy one, standing well above the head of the person who would rock it. And now we learn of a simile rock down in the southern hemisphere, near Buenos Aires. In at least one respect this is more extraordinary than the New York stone. for the latter presents an entirely solid picture to the eye, and one would never suppose that it would rock until one had tried it; but the Argentine boulder looks as though the merest breath would topple it over into the valley below. This rocking stone is no smal] stone with regard to size, either; it is 24 feet high and 18 feet long, and is estimated to weigh somewhat more than 300 tons Puncuine THE Hotes in CHeEses.
There is a joke, hoary with age, about the man who holds the responsible job of punching the holes in the Swiss cheeses. The fact is, the experts of the Department of Agriculture, in their close investigation of the science of cheese-making with a view to making New York and Wisconsin, rather than Edam and Rogquefort, the sources of American cheese supply, have learned a lot about cheeses, and incidentally a good deal about the holes therein. It seems that the holes, whether they appear in the finished product or not, are quite necessary during the intermediate stages of cheese formation, in order to permit of the proper circulation of air through the mass and the proper growth of the mold. Before the cheese is ripe the holes close up, but their work has been done.
The process in connexion with which one particular punch is used is one for making first-class Roque-fort cheese from cow's milk. It was always supposed that goat's milk was necessary for this, and it was believed that the proper conditions for the ripening of the cheeses sere to be found only in certain caves of the district after which these cheeses take their name. But Uncle Sam's inquisitive chemists have learned by long investigation and repeated experiment that they
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.