NOTES. 



127 



hills to the sea will eventually be stocked 

 with English tench. 



A Cleyer Shepherd-Dogt — At a field trial 

 of shepherd-dogs held at Bala, in Wales, 

 last October, for a prize of fifty guineas, 

 one of the contestants, a pure-bred Scotch 

 colley, named Sam, performed some mar- 

 velous feats which have earned for his por- 

 trait a place in the American Agriculturist. 

 The duty the dog had to perform was, to 

 drive three sheep, just released from the 

 fold, into a pen with an entrance six feet 

 wide at about five hundred yards' distance. 

 The difficult nature of the performance was 

 increased by the great wildness of the small, 

 wiry mountain-sheep of Wales, which leads 

 them to go in any direction rather than the 

 right one, and each one to scamper off in 

 its own chosen direction. Sam, however, 

 was not to be defeated, and, *' surrounding" 

 his three wayward sheep by rapidly-exe- 

 cuted flank-movements, had them safely 

 penned in eleven minutes and a half. Sam's 

 next performance was rendered more diffi- 

 cult of accomplishment by sundry unlucky 

 accidents. A flock of geese got mixed up 

 with the sheep, but Sam cleverly extricated 

 his flock. Then two of the sheep jumped 

 over a stone-wall, and the third leaped into 

 the river. Sam persuaded two to come 

 back again, and then hauled the third out 

 of the water by the scruff of the neck and 

 soon had them all in the pen. But, by a mis- 

 take of his master, Sam lost too much time, 

 and although his performances Avere by far 

 the best in other respects, he was adjudged 

 only the third place in the competition. 



Eozoon Canadense* — It was the occasion 

 of a great surprise to geological savants, 

 when it was announced that the hitherto so- 

 called azoic rocks of the Laurentian forma- 

 tion contained fossil remains. Certain dark- 

 green spherules, not larger than pin-heads, 

 were found speckling the mass, like car- 

 away seeds in a cake. These specks were 

 of hard green-stone, or serpentine. In North- 

 ern New York a limestone formation exists, 

 in which these green spherules abound to 

 such an extent as to color or mottle the 

 rock, so that it is called verd-antique mar- 

 ble. These green globules are the same 

 with those in the rocks of the St. Lawrence. 



They have now for a few years been known 

 by the name Eozoon Canaden'ie. Mr. H. J. 

 Carter, in the Annals and Magazine of Nat- 

 ural History, as cited in the American 

 Journal of Science, seems to have given 

 Eozoon Canadense its death-blow. He de- 

 clares that it is not a Zoraminifer, or calca- 

 reous rhizopod secretion. It was argued, 

 by those who claimed for it a fossil charac- 

 ter, that it was a Zoraminifer infiltrated with 

 serpentine. Mr. Carter has made a study 

 of infiltrated specimens of JVtimmulites, 

 Orbitoides, and other minute fossils from 

 the Eocene of Western India. These well 

 preserved their foraminiferous structure. 

 But of the Eozoon Canadense he says : " In 

 vain do we look for the casts of true fora- 

 miniferous chambers at all in the grains of 

 serpentine ; they, for the most part, are not 

 sub-globular, but sub-prismatic." He de- 

 clares himself " at a loss to conceive how 

 the so-called Eozoon Canadense can be iden- 

 tified with foraminiferous structure, except 

 by the wildest conjecture." 



If, then, this absence of structure thus 

 puts out the claim of this so-called Eozoon, 

 or " dawn of life," may it not be timely to 

 ask what evidence of structure there may be 

 in the so-called organism on which the re- 

 cent attempt has been made to prove the 

 existence of land-plants in the Silurian? 



Jasmine flowering early. — For a little 

 time the opening of the winter was severe, 

 after which, until about the close of Janu- 

 ary, the season was exceptionally mild. It 

 told on the budding of trees generally. At 

 Washington, the Jasminum nudijiorum, a 

 Japanese species of jasmine, is cultivated in 

 the open air. This plant burst into bloom 

 about the first of January, some twenty days 

 earlier than is its habit in that latitude. 



NOTES. 



About 800 miles west of Omaha, says 

 the Scientific American, the line of the Union 

 Pacifi^ Railroad crosses Green River, and 

 the approach to the river is for a consider- 

 able distance through a cutting of from 

 twenty to forty feet in depth, made in rock. 

 During the construction of the road, some 

 workmen piled together a few pieces of this 

 rock for a fireplace, and soon observed that 

 the stone itself ignited. It has been shown 

 by analysis that the rock, which is a shale, 



