FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



139 



Weed began his watch before full day- 

 light in the morning, ten minutes before 

 the bird got off from its nest, and con- 

 tinued it till after dark. During the 

 busy day Mr. Weed says, in his sum- 

 mary, the parent birds made almost two 

 hundred visits to the nest, bringing food 

 nearly every time, though some of the 

 trips seem to have been made to furnish 

 grit for the grinding of the food. There 

 was no long interval when they were not 

 at work, the longest period between vis- 

 its being twenty-seven minutes. Soft- 

 bodied caterpillars were the most abun- 

 dant elements of the food, but crickets 

 and crane flies were also seen, and doubt- 

 less a great variety of insects were taken, 

 but precise determination of the quality 

 of most of the food brought was of course 

 impossible. The observations were un- 

 dertaken especially to learn the regular- 

 ity of the feeding habits of the adult 

 birds. The chipping sparrow is one of 

 the most abundant and familiar of our 

 birds. It seeks its nesting site in the 

 vicinity of houses, and spends most of its 

 time searching for insects in grass lands 

 or cultivated fields and gardens. In New 

 England two broods are usually reared 

 each season. That the j'oung keep the 

 parents busy catching insects and re- 

 lated creatures for their food is shown 

 by the minute record which the author 

 publishes in his paper. The bird de- 

 serves all the protection and encourage- 

 ment that can be given it. 



Park-making among the Sand 

 Dunes. — For the creation of Golden 

 Gate Park the park-makers of San Fran- 

 cisco had a series of sand hills, " hills on 

 hills, all of sand-dune formation." The 

 city obtained a strip of land lying be- 

 tween the bay and the ocean, yet close 

 enough to the center of population to be 

 cheaply and easily reached from all parts 

 of the town. Work was begun in 1SG9, 

 and has been prosecuted steadily since, 

 with increasing appropriations, and the 

 results are a credit to the city. Golden 

 Gate Park, Mr. Frank H. Lamb says in 

 his account of it in The Forester, having 

 a charm that distinguishes it from other 

 city parks. It has a present area of 1,040 

 acres, of which 300 acres have been suffi- 

 ciently reclaimed to be planted with co- 

 niferous trees. " It is this portion of the 

 park which the visitor sees as one of the 

 sights of the Golden Gate." As he rides 



through the park out toward the Cliff 

 House and Sutro Heights by the Sea, " he 

 sees still great stretches of sand, some 

 loose, some still held in place by the long 

 stems and rhizomes of the sand grass 

 (Arundo arenaria). This is the prepara- 

 tory stage in park-making. The method 

 in brief is as follows: The shifting sand 

 is seeded with Arundo arenaria, and 

 this is allowed to grow two years, when 

 the ground is sufficiently held in place 

 to begin the second stage of reclama- 

 tion, which consists in planting arboreal 

 species, generally the Monterey pine 

 {Pimts insiffnis) and the Monterey cy- 

 press {CupiTSSus macrocarpus) ; with 

 these are also planted the smaller Lepto- 

 spermvm Iwvigatum and Acacia lati- 

 folia. These species in two or more years 

 complete the reclamation, and then at- 

 tention is directed to making up all losses 

 of plants and encouraging growth as 

 much as possible." The entire cost of 

 reclamation by these methods is repre- 

 sented not to average more than fifty dol- 

 lars per acre. 



A Fossiliferous Formation below 

 the Cambrian. — ]\Ir. George F. Mat- 

 thew said, in a communication to the 

 New York Academy of Sciences, that he 

 had been aware for several years of the 

 existence of fauna in the rocks below 

 those containing Paradoridcs and Pro- 

 tolenus in New Brunswick, eastern Can- 

 ada, but that the remains of the higher 

 types of organisms found in those rocks 

 were so poorly preserved and fragmen- 

 tary that they gave a very imperfect 

 knowledge of their nature. Only the 

 casts of HyoUthidw, the mold of an obe- 

 lus, a ribbed shell, and parts of what ap- 

 peared to be the arms and bodies of cri- 

 noids were known, to assure us that 

 there had been living forms in the seas 

 of that early time other than Protozoa 

 and burrowing worms. These objects 

 were found in the upper division of a 

 series of rocks immediately subjacent to 

 the Cambrian strata containing Proto- 

 lenns. etc. As a decided physical break 

 was discovered between the strata con- 

 taining them and those having Proto- 

 Icnus, the underlying series was thought 

 worthy of a distinctive name, and was 

 called Etchemenian, after a tribe of abo- 

 rigines that once inhabited the region. 

 In most countries the basement of the 

 Paleozoic sediments seems almost de- 



