Notes

Abstract

THIS week the American Society of Naturalists has been holding at Princeton, N.J., its eleventh annual meeting, the chair being occupied by Prof. Henry F. Osborn, Columbia College, New York. On Tuesday a lecture was to be delivered by Dr. C. Hart Merriam on the Diak Valley Expedition (illustrated). On Wednesday, after the transaction of general business, the following reports on marine biological laboratories were to be read:—The Sea Isle Laboratory, by Prof. J. A. Rider, University of Pennsylvania; a marine station in Jamaica, by Prof. E. A. Andrews, Johns Hopkins University; the marine laboratories of Europe, by Dr. D. Bashford Dean, Columbia College; and the outlook for a marine observatory at Woods Holl, by Prof. C. O. Whitman, University of Chicago. In the evening the annual dinner of the society was to be held, and the president's address was to be delivered. The following are the principal arrangements for to-day (Thursday):—A paper is to be read by Dr. C. W. Stiles, Agricultural Bureau, Washington, on the endowment of the American table at Naples; and reports are to be read on botanical explorations in Florida, by Prof. W. P. Wilson, University of Pennsylvania; the summer work of the U. S. Fish-Commission Schooner Grampus, by Prof. William Libbey, Junr., Princeton College; and expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History into New Mexico, Wyoming, and Dakota, by Dr. J. L. Wortman, American Museum Natural History. Then will come the annual discussion, the subject being, What were the former areas and relations of the American Continent, as determined by faunal and floral distribution? The following papers will be read:—Introduction, and evidences from past and present distribution of mammal, by Prof. W. B. Scott, Princeton College; evidence from past and present distribution of reptiles, by Dr. George Baur, University of Chicago; evidence from the distribution of birds, by Prof. J. A. Allen, American Museum of Natural History; and evidence from the distribution of plants, by Dr. N. L. Britton, Columbia College. Special meetings have been held by the American Societies of Anatomists, Morphologists, and Physiologists.