272 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXIV. No. 870 



Arizona " ; ' and, in said article, the Creta- 

 ceous formation receives mention as follows:' 



The Cretaceous. — About tTfenty-six miles north- 

 west of Fort Apache near Forestdale (not far 

 from Pinedale mentioned in the article above) a 

 coal outcrop is exposed, which seems on litholog- 

 ical grounds, to be the same as the Fort Union 

 or Laramie coal of New Mexico. The extent of 

 this coal series is not known to the writer as it 

 is almost everywhere covered with later deposits. 

 Albert B. Reagan 



Nett Lake, Minn. 



THE SECOND RECORD FOR BLANDING's TURTLE IN 

 CONCORD, MASS. 



As curator of the Thoreau Museum of 

 Natural History, Middlesex School, Concord, 

 Mass., I have just received a specimen of 

 Blanding's turtle [Emys Blandingii (Hol- 

 brook) Strauch] caught by W. A. Patch on 

 July 19, 1911, in the Concord River, off 

 Dakin's Hill. The specimen was given me 

 by Mr. John Hoar, and is peculiar in that it 

 has a large growth beneath the chin. The 

 only other Concord record is of a specimen 

 taken by Thoreau in the same river, and 

 now (only carapace and plastron) preserved 

 (No. 454) in the Boston Society of Natural 

 History. R. Heber Howe, Jr. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS 

 The Biological Stations of Europe. By 



Charles Atwood Kofoid. United States 



Bureau of Education ; Bulletin, 1910, No. 4. 



Pp. 360. Washington. 



The biologist of sixty and seventy years ago 

 labored under difficulties that the present gen- 

 eration can hardly appreciate. The facilities 

 for work were scarce; books and apparatus of 

 all sorts were hard to obtain; there were no 

 laboratories of any kind with the exception of 

 the dissecting rooms of the medical schools. 

 Little was known of methods of study of 

 marine life. To be sure, one could wander 

 along the shore, picking up the forms living 

 between tides, and could preserve them in a 

 bottle of new rum, but for the species living 



' American Geologist, Vol. XXXII., pp. 265- 

 308. 



» Ibid., p. 280. 



below low-water mark the student and col- 

 lector had to depend upon the wreckage thrown 

 up by storms or upon the contents of the 

 stomachs of fishes. The latter method was 

 employed by Dr. Stimpson in obtaining the 

 material for his work upon the shells of New 

 England, and, while looking over fish refuse 

 for this purpose, was stoned as a crazy man 

 by the boys of Marblehead. It was not until a 

 few years later that the late Dr. Henry Wheat- 

 land, of Salem, constructed the first natural- 

 ist's dredge ever used in America and initiated 

 Stimpson into a line of work which he turned 

 to such good account while acting as naturalist 

 of the Ringgold-Rogers expedition to the 

 North Pacific Ocean. 



The student of to-day has everything ready 

 at hand. From the moment he enters the 

 laboratory as an undergraduate until his doc- 

 tor's dissertation is accepted, everj^thing he 

 needs in the material line is placed before him 

 — specimens, books, apparatus — and all of his 

 time and all of his energies can be devoted to 

 his problem. Then when he goes to the shore 

 for his investigations he is no longer com- 

 pelled, like Johannes Miiller, the father of 

 marine biology, to depend upon the limited 

 facilities of a fisherman's hut. He finds, in 

 almost every region of the globe, a biological 

 station equipped with every requisite for his 

 work. In the evening he states his needs for 

 the next day — animals, apparatus, chemicals 

 —and the next morning he finds these ready 

 in the well-equipped study set aside for his 

 exclusive use. 



Whether this is best in every respect for the 

 student is a question. It is often remarked 

 that the younger men have no such acquaint- 

 ance with the animals and plants, their sys- 

 tematic position, names and habitats, that the 

 older men had, and this lack of knowledge of 

 one aspect of nature is in large measure due 

 to the lack of any necessity of hunting the 

 specimens. A little less helpfulness on the 

 part of the laboratory collector would result 

 in a better acquaintance with life and living 

 things. 



Be this as it may, the fact remains that 

 biological stations are with us and they are 



