Biological Institutions 77 



lonely, but optimistic ranchman and a few salt ponds, rem- 

 nants of its former glory; while Great Salt Lake is but a 

 vestige of its former self. 



Today one may find in Salton Sea a repetition of the story 

 of Lakes Bonneville and Lahontan, while on its shores Nature 

 is showing us how she clothes the desert. 



We are all familiar with the "oldest inhabitant " and we 

 enjoy listening to him as he smokes his pipe and conjures up 

 memories of the past through the curling wreaths of blue 

 smoke, but we are wont to be a bit skeptical when he tells 

 us of the * * old-fashioned New England winter, ' ' when fences 

 presented no barriers to the sleighs, and the farmer had to 

 tunnel through snow in the morning to reach the barn, and 

 feed his cattle. But now comes the scientist to the aid of 

 the "oldest inhabitant" and tells us that after all climates, 

 like peoples, do change, and that the pictures of the "good 

 old days ' ' may not be as highly colored as we sometimes fancy 

 them to be. To gain his information Professor Ellsworth 

 Huntington of Yale has quite rightly gone to the "oldest 

 inhabitants" of America, dwellers of the forest, some of whom 

 were living at the time of Moses, and were creatures of 

 antiquity in the days of Jesus Christ. To most of us indeed 

 the Sequoia, or California "big tree," is a veritable Sphinx, 

 a creature of the past whom we revere both for its lordly 

 mien and its great antiquity, but one with whom we cannot 

 hold converse. But Professor Huntington has learned to read 

 the "riddles of the Sphinx" and in his monograph on the 

 "Climatic Factor" he has told us its story. Each year's 

 growth of a tree leaves its mark upon its stem in the form of 

 a ring of wood, so that, not only does the stem give us a 

 record of the age of the tree, but also of the amount of each 

 year 's growth, which is measured by the thickness of the ring. 

 From a study of the stumps of many fallen trees, Professor 

 Huntington has reached conclusions relative to the "fat 

 years," when the trees made a good growth, and the "lean 

 years" of the past, when growth was slight. But the amount 

 of growth of a tree depends upon the amount of moisture 

 which it receives, and thus Professor Huntington has deter- 

 mined the relative amounts of annual rainfall for several thou- 

 sand years in the past. 



But not alone in the trunks of the big trees can the story 

 of the past be read. In the waters and the old shore lines of 

 lakes may a record too be found. The water of every river 

 contains a certain amount of dissolved substances, washed 

 from the land by rain, which finds its way as "run-off" into 

 the rivers. Thus through countless ages has the ocean 

 acquired its salt, the contribution of land to sea. When a lake 



