It was supposed to have happened thus: the cat had young kittens, and frequently carried them mice, and other animals its prey, and among the rest a young rat: the kittens, not being hungry, played with it, and when the cat came to give suck to the kittens, the rat likewise sucked her.

Meanwhile, soaring oil prices and plummeting real energy yields from liquid fuels have already left economic carnage in their wake, as a fragile global financial system perched on a Matterhorn of debt has been dealt blow after blow by the failure of the real economy to expand as expected.

A community of chimpanzees living on the edges of the savanna in Senegal has learned to fashion and use spears, which they sharpen with their teeth. These are chimps we've been observing for two hundred years; they never used spears. Now they've begun spiking little bush babies with them. The bush babies hide in hollow trees. The chimps do a sort of frog-gigging number on them and pull them out like fondue.

Very frequently, however, to shorten the distance to the upper nurseries, where they have to take the eggs, they project an arch of about ten inches in length, and half an inch in breadth, groved or worked into steps, on its upper surface, to allow of a more easy passage.