84 THE NAUTILUS. 



I say *' see " advisedly, for they have already seen two very remark- 

 able things right here at home. The first was a find of Valvata in 

 Washington Park, and the second a remarkable find of five species 

 of land shells at 63d and Prairie Ave., where the South Side ele- 

 vated " goes round the bend." There were hundreds of Pyramidula 

 striatella, Zonitoides, Vitreas and Vallonias. These, mind you, were 

 brought in by pupils who a month ago knew not of their existence. 

 They also visit the greenhouses and pick up V. draparnaldi. And 

 the keepers help them in their search. If we have no shell col- 

 lectors in the next generation 'twill be no fault of mine. — E. E. 

 Hand, Department of Zoology, Wendell Phillips High School, 

 Chicago. 



Nine hundred and twelve Pearls in one Unio — W. H. 

 Toms, a clam-digger of Adrian, Mich., found 912 pearls in a Raisin 

 River clam. One hundred were of marketable size. Fifty are 

 beauties, for which he expects a fortune. — Public Ledger, Phila. 



Collecting on the Sipset River, Alabama. — Since writing 

 last I have made several excursions to the Sipsey. You will remem- 

 ber that, after my work at the Forks, we considered it rather a poor 

 stream for Unionidce. My present impression is that it is going to 

 turn out one of the richest in Alabama, and decidedly peculiar. It 

 is, in fact, very different from other rivers which I have explored. 

 Most of it is " dead water," with a steady, pretty strong current and 

 three or four feet deep; it is very crooked and choked with drift logs. 

 Now and then there are gravel shoals, shallow, with an even, strong 

 current, and these are the places for the mussels, especially Pleuro- 

 bemas. These gravel shoals are altogether peculiar in my experience. 

 The bottom is a layer of gravel, a foot or so thick, cemented so that 

 it is quite hard; under this there is loose gravel, in which the mus- 

 sels generally live. At the Forks I used to wonder why the musk- 

 rats left so many shells and I found so few. A farmer there, who 

 had taken out river gravel for a road, gave me the explanation, 

 which I have verified : only a few mussels are in the top layer, but 

 great numbers of them under the cemented portion ; the muskrats 

 get to them through small crevices. The proper way to work these 

 shoals will be to have a man dig away the cemented part, which is 

 not very hard, and get to the layer beneath — H. H. Smith. 



