Spitzbergen this summer, winter in the islands to the north, and attempt a journey towards the Pole in May, 1873, with reindeersledges. THE HASSLER EXPEDITION.- Here we are north of the equator again. We arrived at this port on the 25th, all well. We have touched at many places along the western coast of South America. At Payta, the last place on the coast before going to the Galapagos Islands, a large collection was made considering the time we remained there, and among the fishes were two specimens, male and female, of a Cestracion; these we also found at the Galapagos. All the collections we had on board at that time were sent to New York by the U. S. S. Ossipee which sailed the same day we did. We left Payta on the 6th inst, sailing directly for Galapagos arriving there on the 10th inst. We anchored the first night in Post Office Bay, a little haven on the north side of Charles Island which is one of the most southern of the group. After leaving Charles Island, we stopped at Albermarle, James, Jervis and Indefatigable Islands, collecting more or less at every stopping place. Our collection at the Galapagos is very satisfactory, being very large, and includes, in fish, fifty-two species. We found in great quantities the two large species of Amblarhynchus, so accurately described in Darwin's "Voyage," etc., and obtained some thirty of each species. Some of the land species were three or four feet long and one weighed thirteen pounds. We have twentyfive birds' skins and many birds in alcohol, three seals' skins and a number of skulls. Jervis Island seemed to be quite an extensive seal rookery and we saw hundreds of land seals on the shore. They were very tame, thus giving us a favorable opportunity to study them. There was one family group on the beach which we looked at as long a time as we pleased, being only a few feet from them. The mother appeared not to be alarmed as long as we did not touch her two young ones: they were walking about on all fours like a dog, their hind and fore feet bent forward. We found inhabitants (seven persons) only on Charles Island, of those we visited, although other islands are inhabited. We left the Islands on the 19th, making nine days' stay.-J. HENRY BLAKE, Panama, June 30th. [Since the receipt of this letter, Count Pourtales has returned to Cambridge, and we understand that Professor Agassiz and other members of the Expedition will soon return home by the way of San Francisco.-EDs.] ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS. L. M., Norwich, Conn. -The singular moth found on the cucumber vine is the Egeria cucurbite of Harris. E. M. B., Templeton, Mass.- The plant is Marchantia polymorpha, one of the Hepat icæ, or liverworts. C. W., Wethersfield, Conn. -The chrysalis in the stem of the currant is that of the common Currant Borer (Trochilium tipuliforme Linn.) — an importation from Europe. It is, of course, necessary that the larvæ of Nematus ventricosus -hould undergo then last moult before they can become pupæ. — C. V. R. Lonsdale, R. I. the NATURALIST. The insect sent is Corydulus cornutus, noticed p. 436, Vol. i, of EXCHANGES. Pollen of Passiflora, and various Poduræ offered in exchange for Microscopic specimens.-SWAN M. BURNETT, M.D., Knoxville, Tenn. BOOKS RECEIVED. The American Journal of the Medical Sciences. July, 1872. Philadelphia. The Half-yearly Abstract of the Medical Sciences, July, 1872. Philadelphia. Tidsskrift for Populære Fremstillinger at Naturvidenskaben. Binds 4 left 2. 1872. Kiabenhavn. New North American Myriapods. By O. Harger. 8vo. pp. 6 and plates. July, 1972. Proceedings of the Lyceum of Natural History in the City of New York, Vol. I. pages 1-24, 1870-71. Report of the Museums and Lecture Rooms Syndicate for 1871. 4to. pp. 26, 1872, University of Cambridge. On the Economic Value of Certain Australian Forest Trees, and their Cultivation in California. By Robert E, C, Stearns. Svo. pp. 12. San Francisco, July 1, 1872. Notes on the Natural History of Fort Macon, N. C., and vicinity. No. 2. By Elliott Coues, pp 24. July, 1872. Preliminary Description of New Tertiary Mammals. Part I. By O. C. Marsh. pp. 7. New Haven. Recd. July 23, 1872. Part 2, pp, 8, Recd. Aug. 8, 1872. On the Address before the American Association of Prof. T. Sterry Hunt. By James D. Dana. No 2, pp. 10. August 1872. New Haven, Directions for the Collection of Coleoptera for the use of beginners. By Geo. Dimmock. I mo. pp. 26. Springfield. Notes of an Ornithological Reconnoissance of portions of Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. By J. A. Allen. Bulletin M. C. Z. Vol. 3. No. 6. July, 1872. Description d'un Nouveau Papillon Fossile (Satyrites Reynesti), trouve a Air en Provence. By Samuel H. Scudder. pp. 7, and plate. Paris. 1872. Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 20th Meeting heil at Indianapolis, Indiana, August 1871, 8vo. pp. 491. Cambridge. 1872. Grevilled, a Monthly Record of Cryptogamic Botany and its Literature. Edited by M. (. Cooke, London. No. 1 July 1872. 8vo. pp. 16 and colored plate. Popular Science Monthly. Nos, for August and September. 1872. New York. Schriften der koniglichen physikalisch-okonomischen Gesellschaft zu Konigsberg. Jahrgang 10 and 11, 1869, 1870. 4 pamphlets, 4to. Konigsberg, 1869-771. Verhandlungen der kaiserlichen koniglichen geologischen Reichsanstalt. 8vo pamph. Nos. 1418. Jahrgang. 1871. Wien, Entomologische Zeitung. Svo pamph. Jahrgang 32. Stettin. 1871. Eighth Annual Report of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club for the year ending 31st March, The American Journal of Science and Arts. The Scottish Naturalist. July, 1872. Perth. La Revue Scientifique. Nos. for June and Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club, Vol. London. Le Naturaliste Canadien. July, 1872. Quebec. AN ADDRESS BY PROF. ASA GRAY, PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, DELIVERED AT THE MEETING HELD AT DUBUQUE, IOWA, AUGUST, 1872. THE session being now happily inaugurated, your presiding officer of the last year has only one duty to perform before he surrenders his chair to his successor. If allowed to borrow a simile from the language of my own profession, I might liken the President of this association to a biennial plant. He flourishes for the year in which he comes into existence, and performs his appropriate functions as presiding officer. When the second year comes round he is expected to blossom out in an address and disappear. Each President, as he retires, is naturally expected to contribute something from his own investigations or his own line of study, usually to discuss some particular scientific topic. Now, although I have cultivated the field of North American Botany, with some assiduity, for more than forty years, have reviewed our vegetable hosts, and assigned to no small number of them their names and their place in the ranks, yet, so far as our own wide country is concerned, I have been to a great extent a closet botanist. Until this summer I had not seen the Mississippi, nor set foot upon a prairie. To gratify a natural interest, and to gain some title for addressing a body of practical naturalists and explorers, I have made Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by the PEABODY ACADEMY OF SCIENCE, in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. AMER. NATURALIST, VOL. VI. 37 (577) a pilgrimage across the continent. I have sought and viewed in their native haunts many a plant and flower which for me had long bloomed unseen, or only in the hortus siccus. I have been able to see for myself what species and what forms constitute the main features of the vegetation of each successive region, and record— as the vegetation unerringly does the permanent characteristics of its climate. Passing on from the eastern district, marked by its equably distributed rainfall, and therefore naturally forest-clad, I have seen the trees diminish in number, give place to wide prairies, restrict their growth to the borders of streams, and then disappear from the boundless drier plains; have seen grassy plains change into a brown and sere desert - desert in the common sense, but hardly anywhere botanically so; have seen a fair growth of conif erous trees adorning the more favored slopes of a mountain range high enough to compel summer showers; have traversed that broad and bare elevated region shut off on both sides by high mountains from the moisture supplied by either ocean, and longi tudinally intersected by sierra's which seemingly remain as naked as they were born; and have reached at length the westward slopes of the high mountain barrier which, refreshed by the Pacific, bears the noble forests of the Sierra Nevada and the Coast Range, and among them trees which are the wonder of the world. As I stood in their shade, in the groves of Mariposa and Calaveras, and again under the canopy of the commoner Redwood, raised on columns of such majestic height and ample girth, it occurred to me that I could not do better than to share with you, upon this occasion, some of the thoughts which possessed my mind. In their development they may, perhaps, lead us up to questions of consid erable scientific interest. I shall not detain you with any remarks (which would now be trite) upon the size or longevity of these far-famed Sequoia trees. or of the sugar pines, incense-cedar and firs associated with them, of which even the prodigious bulk of the dominating Sequoia does not sensibly diminish the grandeur. Although no account and no photographic representation of either species of the far-famed Sequoia trees gives any adequate impression of their singular majesty still less of their beauty-yet my interest in them did not culminate merely or mainly in considerations of their size and age. Other trees, in other parts of the world, may claim to be older. Certain Australian gum trees (Eucalypti) are said to be taller. Some, we are told, rise so high that they might even cast a flicker of shadow upon the summit of the pyramid of Cheops. Yet the oldest of them doubtless grew from seed which was shed long after the names of the pyramid builders had been forgotten. So far as we can judge from the actual counting of the layers of several trees, no Sequoia now alive can sensibly antedate the Christian era. Nor was I much impressed with an attraction of man's adding. That the more remarkable of these trees should bear distinguishing appellations seems proper enough: but the tablets of personal names which are affixed to many of them in the most visited groves,—as if the memory of more or less notable people of our day might be made more enduring by the juxtaposition,-do suggest some incongruity. When we consider that a hand's breadth at the circumference of any one of the venerable trunks so placarded has recorded in annual lines the lifetime of the individual thus associated with it, one may question whether the next hand's breadth may not measure the fame of some of the names thus ticketed for adventitious immortality. Whether it be the man or the tree that is honored in the connection, probably either would live as long, in fact and in memory, without it. One notable thing about these Sequoia trees is their isolation. Most of the trees associated with them are of peculiar species, and some of them are nearly as local. Yet every pine, fir, and cypress in California is in some sort familiar, because it has near relatives in other parts of the world. But the redwoods have none. The redwood-including in that name the two species of "big-trees" -belongs to the general cypress family, but is sui generis. Thus isolated systematically, and extremely isolated geographically, and so wonderful in size and port, they more than other trees suggest questions. Were they created thus local and lonely, denizens of California only; one in limited numbers in a few choice spots on the Sierra Nevada, the other along the coast range from the Bay of Monterey to the frontiers of Oregon? Are they veritable Melchizedecs, without pedigree or early relationship, and possibly fated to be without descent? Or are they now coming upon the stage (or rather were they coming but for man's interference) to play a part in the future? |