i 5 2 THE NA TURE-STUD Y REIVE W [ 2 : 4 -april, 1906 



Cheat Changing to Wheat. The weed known as cheat or chess which 

 often appears suddenly in wheat fields, has long been believed by many people 

 ignorant of the principles of botany to originate from wheat, particularly in 

 seasons unfavorable to wheat. The experiments referred to in the note above 

 seem to .--how that cheat seeds do not long remain dormant in soil, and that 

 probablv the unexpected appearance of cheat is usually due to its having been 

 recently sown with wheat or other grains or with manure'. 



NEWS NOTES 

 Practical Nature-Study. Principal Myron T. Scudder of the State 

 Normal School at New Paltz, N. Y. , is working for the formation of an Ulster 

 Countv Country School Press Club, the purpose of which will be to dissem- 

 inate through every county paper, information and suggestions concerning the 

 work of the country schools. He is also trying to organize nature study 

 clubs in every school and when the spring planting season fairly opens some 

 of these schools will go into out-door nature-study work, the planting of 

 school-gardens, the study of elementary agriculture, the keeping of bees and 

 the incubation of eggs. All these things are practiced at the model depart- 

 ment of his own school. An incubator cellar has been fitted up and hun- 

 dreds of chickens have been raised during the past three years. The chicks are 

 put into an in-door brooder in the large primary room where the little chil- 

 dren feed and water them, and use them individually as living material for 

 clay modeling and painting. After a few days they are transferred to out- 

 door brooders and colony houses, hawk-protected, on the campus where they 

 are cared for until commencement time, when they are distributed amongst 

 the children to take home. During the process of incubation eggs are broken 

 open from time to time so that the children may watch the embryos. This 

 work gives abundant opportunities, not only for nature-study and for biolog- 

 ical study, but for related activities in the carpenter shop, as well as in draw- 

 ing, painting, composition work, cooking, food values, etc. 



Miss Jean Broadhurst, formerly assistant in botany in Barnard College, 

 now instructor in biology and nature-studv in the New [ersev State Normal 

 School, has been appointed instructor in biology and nature-study in Teach- 

 ers College, Columbia Universitv. She will give special attention to the 

 plant side of nature-study in botanical and educational courses for teachers-in- 

 training. 



Mrs. Mary H. Hunt, the originator and leader of the movement tor 

 temperance instruction in connection vith public school physiology, died at 

 her home in Boston April 23rd. 



Professor William Lochhead has removed from the Ontario Agri- 

 cultural College to the new Macdonald College, Quebec, where he will 

 develop a department of biology and nature-studv. 



