Mar, 1—I noted in my "Noon Bulletin" the other day that the food controller in England had turned his attention to eggs, and although he still permits "the celebrated English egg and bacon to go together," he only allows one egg per meal. Far be it from me to suggest that there ig "something rotten in the State of Denmark" when such a subject is discussed; but I must at least suggest that, when making his rules, the food controller should define his egg. Mr. Punch has been anxious about the same subject for I see in his number dated December 18 an article entitled "The Common Egg" in which correspondents, assuming that eggs are no longer procurable, are trying to determine what of egg was: and one suggests:—'the egg was a spheroidal body produced by the female Aepyorhis, a Madagascan bird. It measured three feet in circumference and contained two gallons..." Thus Mr. Punch, with his traditional wit. gets laugh by sticking to the solemn truth! For the "recently extinct", Aepyornis (or Epyornis) was about the size of a giraffe and laid eggs with a very thick shell containing anything from fifteen pints to two. gallons of nourishment. Mr, Arthur Mee, in his encyclopaedia, is so anxious to impress the children with the size of this bird that he says the eggs measured thirty-six inches by thirty....but I am afraid he was thinking of circumferences, not lengths, for the more solemn and reliable Encyc. Brit. gives the measurements as 12% by 9% inches even so, an outsize for a breakfast egg. But to take this problem further we should think of Americans being at war and having to deal with Hummingbirds' eggs: the tiniest of these are about the size of a wasp's egg, and it is calculated that 340 of them would equal one hen's egg; so the natives might be rationed with "two and a half gross of eggs—and bacon" for their breakfast, When war took place in ancient Madagascar the position of the food controller must have been most puzzling: with an Epyornis egg equal to 148 domestic hen's eggs, his only course would be to insist on scrambling them.—
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.