7° THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION, 
not in a state of fusion but aqueous, had under pressure perhaps, 
been forced all through the mass, leaving no interstices. 
The effect produced is as if an unsymmetrical piece of encrinal 
limestone had been smeared with a thick coat of adhesive mortar 
and then rolled over a layer of broken stone or gravel, some pieces 
angular, some rounded at the corners, some pieces of quartz, some 
gneiss or granite, others Trenton limestone drift, cohering in a mass 
as if brown cement in a condition like “‘ batter ” had hardened about 
the mass. 
Some apprehensions are beginning to be expressed as to the 
too reckless process of deforestation that is now going on. When 
the woods go many birds will go also. This assertion is even now 
being made plain. 
The chicadees, like the European robin, sometimes come 
about farm dwellings to obtain food, bnt they show great fear of the 
shrike destroyer that is increasing in numbers and makes prey on 
many small species of birds. The chicadees come to our neigh- 
bors’ kitchen doors now every day in parties of three, four or five, 
for crumbs and small pickings of food. 
APRIL 4th, Ig00. 
Despite of the frosty nights and cold blustering winds of the 
daytime our red-breasted feathered acquaintances, the robins, were 
heard in our orchard trees singing their blithe notes just after sun- 
rise on the morning of the 21st March, and on the day following, 
when the weather had become somewhat warmer. Blue-birds were 
present in the wood margin in considerable numbers, and made the 
leafless groves musical wherever there happened to be a sheltered 
or sunny exposure. The food of these early arriving birds seems to 
be principally the gray or brown moth that hybernates in the cre- 
_ vices and under the surfaces of the scaling off strips of bark of the 
sugar-maple and of the elm or other large forest trees. A few hours 
of sunshine about the beginning of March, or even at the ending of 
February, tempts these lepidoptera forth from their winter retreats, 
and often at that period of the year the gatherers of maple sap find 
numbers of the moths drowned in the sap of the receiving pails, as 
the weak saccharine aroma of the dripping fluid seems to possess a 
