June 27, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



977 



black rhinoceros, East African buffalo, eland, 

 leopard, cheetah, antelope and mordiey. 



The Tokyo Statistical Society of Japan, 

 having recently suffered the loss by fire of a 

 valuable library it had been thirty-three years 

 in gathering, John Hyde, former statistician 

 of the Department of Agriculture, has pre- 

 sented the society with 3,000 volumes of sta- 

 tistical literature to form the nucleus of a 

 new collection. In addition to official publi- 

 cations of 52 countries, printed in twelve dif- 

 ferent languages, the gift includes the trans- 

 actions for a long series of years of most of 

 the leading statistical societies of the world, 

 as well as a large number of miscellaneous 

 books of reference. In accepting the gift, the 

 president of the society. Baron Sakatani, 

 former finance minister, announced that the 

 library would be given the name of the donor. 

 An ecological conference will be held at the 

 University of Chicago during the summer 

 quarter; the following series of illustrated 

 lectures on " The Eelation of Plants and Ani- 

 mals to Environment," will be given begin- 

 ning July 16, when Professor Henry C. 

 Cowles, of the department of botany, will 

 speak on " Principles and Problems of Ecol- 

 ogy as illustrated by Plants." On July 18 

 Dr. Victor E. Shelford, of the department of 

 zoology, will discuss " Principles and Prob- 

 lems of Ecology as illustrated by Animals." 

 Lecturers in the conference from other insti- 

 tutions will include Arthur C. Tansley, of 

 Cambridge University, who speaks on " Brit- 

 ish Landscapes"; Professor Carl Schroter, of 

 the University of Zurich, on " The Lake 

 Dwellings and Lake Dwellers of Ancient 

 Switzerland " ; Professor Stephen A. Eorbes, of 

 the University of Illinois, whose subject is 

 " Fish and their Ecological Eelations," and 

 Professor William M. Wheeler, of Harvard 

 University, who wiU discuss in two lectures 

 " The Habits of Ants." 



It is difficult to realize the enormous quan- 

 tities of brick used annually in Greater New 

 York. During 1912 the consumption was 

 over 1,000,000 thousand. The principal source 

 of this vast quantity is the Hudson River re- 

 gion, which extends along both sides of the 



river from New York City to Cohoes and eni- 

 braces ten counties, nine in New York and one 

 in New Jersey. Other sources of supply are 

 the Earitan Eiver region of New Jersey and 

 the Connecticut region. The year 1912 was 

 one of unusual interest in the Hudson Eiver 

 region. It opened with an increasing demand 

 for brick, and the price for common brick was 

 $7 a thousand, compared with $4.25 in 1911. 

 For several years the use of cement or con- 

 crete in construction appeared to be displacing 

 brick to some extent, but owing to the strong 

 " back to brick " movement the year 1912 saw 

 in the New York market a change favoring 

 brick as the best building material for many 

 purposes. Influences that have contributed to 

 this change are the failure of some concrete 

 buildings, the advertising campaign carried on 

 by the brickmalvers, and the improved quality 

 of the Hudson Eiver brick. The average price 

 was the highest since 1906. The marketed 

 product in 1912 was larger than that of 1911 

 and would probably have been still greater but 

 for the scarcity of labor, especially at Haver- 

 straw, and the strike among the briekmakers 

 in the Newburgh district. The strike, how- 

 ever, was of short duration, but the scarcity of 

 labor drawn away by large construction enter- 

 prises, such as the Catskill aqueduct, railroad 

 extensions and subway operations, was a seri- 

 ous drawback to the Hudson Eiver briekma- 

 kers in 1912. This condition was so serious 

 that the operators resorted to night work and 

 rainy-day work in loading barges and im- 

 ported laborers from the South. An important 

 development during the year was a large in- 

 crease in the use of Earitan Eiver brick in 

 New York City, which has for some years been 

 drawing on the Earitan Eiver region. In 1912 

 the demand for this brick was very much 

 greater than ever before. On the whole the 

 year may be considered one of prosperity. 

 The demand was good, prices were high, the 

 mild weather toward the end of the year per- 

 mitted shipments to its very close, and while 

 the marketed product was not the largest 

 recorded, it was considerably larger than that 

 of 1911. The statistics gathered by Jefferson 

 Middleton, of the United States Geological 



