312 NATURAL SCIENCE. Nov , 1895. 



Adders Again. 



We would direct the attention of those who continue to con- 

 tribute to the Field their experiences of adders swallowing their young 

 to the following paragraph which we cull from a recent publication : — 



"It is painful to witness the agony of a mother snake sometimes 

 when, in the flurry and excitement following the appearance of a man 

 amongst the group of reptiles, the offspring of some other snake 

 accidentally take refuge down her throat. She has not the capacity 

 to hold her neighbour's young and her own, of course, and when she 

 has been filled up with strangers and a couple of stray ones of her 

 own appear upon the scene and clamour for admission, her position 

 indeed becomes a trying one. The enemy is at hand, there is no 

 time to disgorge and re-assort the cargo, and the poor old snake is 

 compelled to wriggle away as fast as she is able, leaving her own 

 offspring to perish while she reluctantly saves the lives of others which 

 do not belong to her." 



Chinook. 

 The Smithsonian Institution (Bureau of Ethnology) is doing all 

 in its power to collect and preserve the Indian dialects, now so rapidly 

 passing beyond recovery. The latest publications are "Chinook 

 Texts" (1894), i^ which various myths of the Clatsop and Chinook 

 tribes are set down with a readable English translation. The collec- 

 tion of this dialect was made in the very nick of time, for Dr. Franz 

 Boas found only two individuals who could speak the dialect. One 

 of these, named Charles Cultee (or more properly QJElte') proved a 

 veritable storehouse of information, and so grasped Dr. Boas's wishes 

 that he even explained the grammatical construction of the sentences 

 and elucidated the sense of different periods. In the other volume, 

 "The Siouan Tribes of the East" (1894) ^^r- James Mooney has 

 given the synonymy of the different tribes dealt with and an historical 

 sketch from the earliest times to the present. 



In the Twelfth Report of the Committee on the Fossil Phyllo- 

 poda of the Palaeozoic Rocks, han'ded in to the British Association at 

 Ipswich by Professor Rupert Jones, a list has been drawn up of all 

 species referred to in the Reports between 1 883-1 894. The Report 

 is also interesting from the fact that Professor Lapworth has drawn 

 up a table of the comparative nomenclature of the Lower Palaeozoic 

 Rocks from the Olenellus zone to the Ludlow series, which will be 

 useful to others than the student of phyllopods, and a table of the 

 geological range of genera and species. Professor Jones gives a 

 fourth table showing the geological order of species. 



