870 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 439. 



interesting points will be deferred until I 

 shall have been able to assemble more exten- 

 sive and newer data. 



N. Ernest Dorsey. 

 Annapolis Junction, Mabtland, 

 January 31, 1903. 



THE OVERSPUN STRING. 



Loading a string by ' overspinning ' with 

 wire, as is well known, causes it to produce 

 a deeper tone without adding to its length. It, 

 also, can be strung over a finger-board, where 

 it may be ' stopped,' thus enabling a single 

 string to produce an octave or more with its 

 chromatic intervals, and to take the place of 

 eight or more long open strings. So far as 

 my information goes, the overspun string was 

 introduced into France by St. Oolombe about 

 1675. The chitarrone with its very long open 

 bass strings dates from 1589 and was used in 

 orchestras in 1607. I am desirous of ascer- 

 taining whether the superiority of the over- 

 spun string over the long open string for the 

 deeper tones was known earlier than I have 

 mentioned, and whether the chitarrone was 

 used because the overspinning was unknovra.. 

 E. H. Hawley. 



U. S. National Museum. 



NOTES ON THE JUDITH RIVER GROUP. 



In August, 1876, Mr. J. C. Isaac (who had 

 been my assistant earlier in the season in the 

 chalk of Kansas) and myself joined Professor 

 E. D. Cope at Omaha, to go with him as his 

 assistants to the Judith River region in Mon- 

 tana. From Franklin, Idaho, we made the 

 journey of 600 miles to Fort Benton by stage. 

 Here the professor purchased a wagon, four 

 work horses and three saddle ponies, employed 

 a cook (to act also as teamster) and a scout, 

 who was to warn us of danger from Indians. 

 Sitting Bull with his thousands of braves was 

 south of our field, fighting the soldiers. We 

 traveled down the Missouri River opposite 

 Clagett, an Indian trading post, 120 miles 

 below Fort Benton. Here we crossed the 

 river, and went into camp on Dog Creek, a 

 few miles east of the Judith River, and about 

 ten miles from its mouth. The canon of this 

 creek was narrow. We were shut in by the 



dark and desolate Bad-lands, which, as I re- 

 raember, the professor estimated as over 1,000 

 feet high. The lower slopes were, composed 

 of beds of lignite, from a few inches to six 

 feet in thickness, and black shale, the lignite 

 layers not appearing in the great bed of shale 

 in its upper part. Professor Cope made a 

 sketch of the wonderful panorama, which I 

 afterwards saw published. The shale disin- 

 tegrated into dust on the surface, into which 

 one sank to his knees in climbing some steep 

 ascent. This formation, Cope assured me, 

 belonged to the Fort Pierre group of the 

 Cretaceous. We found many bones in it, of 

 mosasaurs and fishes, similar to those I had 

 already collected in western Kansas. After 

 my return from Montana I felt sure the black 

 shales then called Niobrara belonged to the 

 Fort Pierre, on account of their faunal and 

 stratigraphical resemblances to those on Dog 

 Creek. It was years, however, before this 

 view was generally accepted. I remember one 

 very good quadrate I picked up on Dog Creek 

 which I thought belonged to a Platecarpus. 

 We could have made large collections of these 

 fishes and mosasaurs but for the fact they 

 were poorly preserved and interfered with the 

 main object of the expedition. 



On top of the Pierre deposits, which were 

 the thickest, were the buff-colored sandstones 

 of the Fox Hills group. We found no fossils 

 in it, but I was assured by Cope of their posi- 

 tion in the series. The Judith River beds, 

 or Cretaceous No. 6, as Cope identified them, 

 were above the Fox HiUs. The rocks of thia 

 formation were composed of sandstone and 

 clay. On the very highest summits of the 

 Bad-lands was a thin bed of oyster shells. 

 We remained in our camp over a month here. 

 Every morning at sunrise we were in the 

 saddle, taking a lunch of crackers and bacon. 

 We returned late in the evening. Our chief 

 discoveries were from a yellowish sandstone, 

 in which we found many bone-beds, where 

 loose teeth, bones and fragments of turtle 

 shells were mingled together, often weathered 

 out, lying loose on the surface. I have been 

 deeply interested in reading Professor H. F. 

 Osborn's and Mr. L. M. Lambe's ' Contribu- 

 tions to Canadian Paleontology,' Vol. III., 



