﻿172 POMONA COLLEGE JOURNAL OF ENTOMOLOGY 



The annual meeting of the San Diego Society of Natural History was held 

 at the local ofifice of the Weather Bureau on January 13. at 4 F. M. Frank 

 Stephens is the secretary. 



The Southern California Academy of Sciences held its regular monthly 

 meeting on the evening of January 3, in Symphony Hall, Los Angeles. Prof. 

 W. L. Watts gave an Outline of the Geological History of California, and 

 Prof. J. Z. Gilbert spoke on Quaternary Life in California. Both talks being 

 of interest to the biologist. 



At the biological section of the Academy of Sciences, held on January 10, 

 in Los Angeles, Prof. L. H. Miller spoke on Variation in Plants and Animals. 

 It was a very suggestive talk to the biologist, as many of the unsolved prob- 

 lems of organic evolution, will probably be opened up in the study of variation. 



.According to a newspaper report, Dr. Alexander Petrunkevitch of the 

 .\merican Museum of Natural History, on his recent return from ]\Iexico, 

 "brought back 2000 spiders, 500 bottles of insects, and numerous assortments 

 of scorpions, snakes and amphibians." It also states that he found a "very 

 rare trap-door spider" in the State of Tabasco. 



The Sleeping Sickness. By Louis L. Seaman. The Outlook, January 

 15, 1910, p. 119-124. An interesting account of the Tsetse-flies, Glossina Spp. 

 and Trypanosoma gambiense. Trypanosomiasis or Sleeping-sickness is said 

 also to occur in South America, where Glossina is not found, but the disease is 

 transmitted by a bug — "the conorrhinus" ; a small monkey is supposed to be 

 the permanent host of the parasite. 



From the California State Journal of Medicine, December. 1909, the fol- 

 lowing is extracted from the editorials as being of considerable interest : Dr. 

 Creighton Wellnian is to have charge of a department of Tropical Medicine in 

 the State Journal in which he is "to prepare from time to time a critical sum- 

 mary of advances in knowledge in this direction as well as other matter re- 

 lating to the incidence, etc., of tropical disease in this part of the country." A 

 further editorial in the State Journal is as follows : "With the object of gain- 

 ing an idea of the amount of tropical disease in the city of Oakland, the writer 

 has examined a number of patients in its hospitals, clinics and dispensaries, with 

 the result that tertian, quartan and aestivo-autumnal malaria, leprosy, amoebic 

 dysentery and liver abscess, bubonic plague, filariasis, flagellate diarrhoea and 

 various intestinal parasites — including flukes (Opisthorchis) . tapeworms {Di- 

 bothriocephalus), (Taenia), (Hymenolepis) and round worms, (Ascaris, 

 Oxyuris, Nccator, Trichocephalus Strougyloidcs) — have all been seen. It is 

 proposed to publish a fuller communication on this subject when the list is 

 complete, but the existence of these and probably other tropical diseases is here 

 recorded as being of interest and illustrative of the dangers of infection to 

 which the inhabitants of the bay cities are constantly exposed." The State 

 Journal thus becomes of immense interest to all those interested in the study of 

 tropical disease in which the Arthropods and Protozoans play such an impor- 

 tant part. In the Januar\' number of the State Journal is an interesting and 



