1 26 BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 



obviously belonged, by the test just mentioned, to those placed alive 

 in the water. Neither the dead shells nor the seaweed showed the 

 least trace of any young. 



There seems to me no likelihood that oyster planting would succeed 

 in this bay. Not only is the summer temperature too low for breed- 

 ing, but huge starfishes, the oyster's worst enemies, are very abundant, 

 and the wash of the heavy tides must at times cover the living mol- 

 luscs with silt very deleterious to their growth 



It is to be hoped that the presence of these shells in Oak Bay will 

 not be taken by some future naturalist as evidence of recent natural 

 occurrence of oysters in the bay ; and it is partly to prevent such an 

 error that the present note is placed on record. There is a tradition 

 that oyster shells were once found in an old Indian shell-heap at Oak 

 Point, between this bay and the St. Croix river, but I think this very 

 doubtful. The statement by A. Leith Adams in his " Field and 

 Forest Rambles" (page 35) that quahog and oyster shells are abund- 

 ant in shell-heaps in this region, is, of course, altogether an error. 



17. — On the Nature of the Mud in Our Many "Mud Lakes." 



[Read December 6th, 1898.] 

 The best maps of New Brunswick show a branch of the lowermost 

 Nepisiguit Lake running as a cul-de-sac half a mile or more to the 

 southward. Last summer I went into this branch in a canoe, and 

 found it nowhere more than a few inches deep, while in many places 

 the bottom came above the surface. This bottom consisted every- 

 where of soft, grayish, nocculent mud, from which, as the canoe was 

 forced with difficulty through it, arose in large babbles an abundance 

 of a gas smelling like hydrogen sulphide. A pole thrust several feet 

 into it touched no hard bottom except near the shore, and the mud 

 brought up by it from depths greater than a foot or two was of a red- 

 dish rather than a grayish color. I collected abundant samples, and a 

 microscopic examination has shown that it consists almost entirely of 

 minute Plants, Desmids, Diatoms and other unicellular and filament 

 mis Algae, alive on the surface grayish layer and dead in the dtvpcr 

 reddish layers. The members of the Society will recognize these forms 

 as among the most varied and beautiful in form and sculpturing of all 

 living organisms. This mud then is all alive on the surface, and grows 

 where it is found, thus filling up the lake ; as the individuals die, 



