776 
pool and is kept in suspension by the constant 
agitation of the rising water. 
The formation of one of the minerals as- 
sociated with ore deposits under conditions 
that may be observed is of more than passing 
interest and a closer study is in progress. 
J CLauDE JONES 
Mackay SCHOOL OF MINEs, 
RENO, NEVADA 
CERIUM 
Ir any mineral collection contains speci- 
mens of cerium ochre or yttrocerite from 
Bolton or any other Massachusetts locality, I 
should be obliged to the curator of such col- 
lection if he would inform me of the fact 
and give me briefly the history and description 
of the specimen. 
B. K. Emerson 
AMHERST, MASS, 
POPULARIZING SCIENCES 
TuirTY years ago the incorporated city of 
San Diego, California, possessed a population 
of perhaps two thousand. Clergymen, law- 
yers, teachers, business men, working men, 
were alike members of the Society of Natural 
History, and its president, a physician, kept 
up the interest in the monthly meetings. 
Everybody came, bringing a rock or a shell or 
a bird or some object curious or rare, con- 
tributing to the little museum, and arousing 
discussion. 
To-day a six-story concrete building is be- 
ing erected on a lot given to the society for a 
home, one floor to be used for its museum 
and library, the other floors forming part of a 
hotel. With a present population of near 
50,000, annual meetings are held by the so- 
ciety, which are generally attended by barely 
enough members for the election of officers. 
The library and museum are at a standstill. - 
The meteorological records, begun by the so- 
ciety’s president, are continued by a fully 
equipped station of the weather bureau of the 
U. S. Department of Agriculture—of which 
we sometimes hear boastful but seldom in- 
structive remarks. 
A marine biological station has been estab- 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 907 
lished, under control of the state university, 
and given $50,000 for a building—but the 
public rarely hears of any results, except of 
the occasional visit of some noted scientist, as 
heralded in the dailies. 
A floral society now exists, and a botanical 
garden is proposed, to which nurserymen will 
sometime be invited to contribute from their 
commercial stock, but no strictly botanical 
work is in progress in the community, and 
the only attempt in fifteen years met with 
failure for lack of appreciation. 
The city contains three private collections 
of shells, one of insects, one of birds, one or 
two of minerals, two botanists without her- 
baria, one meteorologist (in government em- 
ploy), and a few others interested inactively 
in some phase of science, or about one nat- 
uralist to each five thousand people, which I 
have seen stated to be about the average num- 
ber in the United States. 
I recently visited one of the nearby grand 
ocean beaches, where the sea still breaks in 
spray over the rocks, as it did thirty years 
ago—but the pools that formerly concealed a 
wealth of beautiful wonders in animal and 
plant life have been scraped clean of their 
former treasures. Now and then a crab 
scuttles to safety. A hook and line some- 
times brings one of the finny tribe from the 
deep—but boys and girls can hunt in vain for 
the many nature treasures that formerly 
lined the shores of ocean and nearby bay. 
Children may still reap a treasure in wild 
flowers in springtime—by taking generous car 
rides and then walking—but they will look 
in vain in our paved streets for the trap-door 
spider’s nest that I formerly watched, or for 
the miniature plants like the lichens that 
formerly freely decorated barren spots of 
earth. 
With the increased cost of living, with 
leaps and bounds in the growth of our com- 
mercial life, with a corner lot that cost $5,000 
ten years ago now yielding an annual rental 
of $6,000 to its purchaser, can you expect to 
find nature study gaining ground! 
Science as a study is becoming too compli- 
cated for a layman to take part in the active 
