July 31, 1903.] 



SCIENCE. 



149 



beside a sagebush near the traveled road. I 

 could not stop for any careful examination at 

 the time. I saw no indication of there ever 

 having been a house, village or camp at the 

 spot. The fragments are about one fourth 

 inch thick and appear to be parts of two ves- 

 sels, though they may belong to one. The 

 ware is the usual eoil-made variety without 

 decoration or color. The pressure marks on 

 the outside of the vessel were roughly smoothed 

 over but not obliterated. The natural color 

 is brownish on the outside — gray to blackish 

 within. The firing had been done from the 

 inside. This is shown by the blackened sur- 

 face of the interior and also by the ware hav- 

 ing been more burned inside than out, the 

 heavy burning extending to between one eighth 

 and one sixteenth inch of the outer surface. 

 This characteristic of inside firing I have 

 noted in other ware from the region north of 

 the Colorado Eiver. In this connection I 

 may say that the remains of dwellings and 

 the fragments of pottery are exceedingly nu- 

 merous north of the Colorado Eiver as far as 

 the southern Rim of the Basin, and westerly 

 as far as the Beaver Dam Mountains. East- 

 erly they follow up Green River and its trib- 

 utaries at least as far as latitude 40. The 

 northwesterly limit has not been determined 

 or even approximated as yet. I believe some 

 remains have been found near Parowan but I 

 was unable to authenticate information at this 

 locality. On the Escalante Desert I found no 

 indications as we crossed toward the Pine 

 Valley Mountains, nor could any one I saw 

 tell me of any. It is, nevertheless, possible 

 that there are both pottery and habitation re- 

 mains there near springs, and it would be 

 desirable to have the region carefully ex- 

 amined. 



On Bright Angel Point, south end of the 

 Kaibab Plateau, I found remains of several 

 very small houses near the brink of the 

 canyon. Some fragments of primitive pot- 

 tery were lying around and there were two 

 good specimens of the primitive grinding 

 stone — that is, the kind that arc hollowed out. 

 These were of red sandstone. The house walls 

 were very slight, the best preserved being about 



8x22 feet, with a dividing wall in the middle. 

 This was within twenty feet of the edge of 

 the canyon. The stones were roughly dressed 

 in the usual fashion and were so few appar- 

 ently that the walls must have been very low. 

 I did not have time to dig, but the soil seemed 

 thin. 



It is possible that there was a trail down to 

 the Colorado from this promontory. Down 

 below there are remains of other houses and 

 grinding stones of a similar type, which I 

 saw many years ago. 



There appears to have been less decorated 

 pottery north of the Colorado River than 

 south, and this might be taken as an indica- 

 tion of a more primitive condition of the art 

 in that region. The potsherds around most 

 of the village sites are apt to be without 

 decoration entirely, or only slightly deco- 

 rated. Most of the whole specimens found 

 along the valley of the Virgen are undecorated, 

 and are either corrugated or roughly smoothed 

 without the addition of a slip or of lines in 

 color. The shapes are sometimes good, par- 

 ticularly from the Santa Clara district, where 

 some beautiful examples of red ware have 

 been found. The finding of the ruder forms 

 of pottery in a locality may not imply the 

 occupation of that locality by Amerinds of the 

 stone-house-building type for tent dwellers 

 have made rude pottery and the modeling of 

 occasional pots and firing them from the inside 

 seems to have been understood by many tribes 

 of Amerinds south of the Columbia River. 

 F. S. Delle.nb.4UGH. 



Cragsmoor, N. Y., 

 July 6, 1903. 



SHORTER ARTICLES. 



THE RELATION OF LIME AND MAGNESIA TO 

 METABOLISM. 



In a previous communication to this journal 

 (Vol. XIV. (1901), p. 31) the writer discussed 

 some work carried out with Dr. Oscar Loew on 

 the relation of lime and magnesia to plant 

 growth, the results forming the matter of Bul- 

 letin 1, Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Dept. 

 of Agriculture. Since coming to this station 

 further studies have been made by the writer 



