158 



Dr. A. B. Stout of The New York Botanical Garden gave 

 a report of a meeting of the Canandaigua Botanical Club. 



Forman T. McLean 

 Secretary 



NEWS NOTES 



During the last week in October a forest fire burned over 

 2,500 acres on the lower mountain slopes north of Pasadena, 

 California, and a somewhat larger area was burned on the 

 Malibu Mountains near the coast north of Santa Monica. The 

 direct loss was not great as the areas burned were mostly of 

 shrubby growth, chaparral, but the loss in soil protection was 

 serious. A disasterous flood in January, 1933, near Montrose, 

 with the destruction of homes and cultivated land by boulders 

 and other material washed down from the mountains, followed 

 a fire similar to the present ones, but a few miles further north. 

 In an effort to avoid a recurrence of such a flood, debris basins 

 are being constructed at the mouths of the canyons and the 

 burned areas are being planted with seed of black mustard. 

 On November 4th a special ceremony was staged at the edge of 

 the burned area in Altadena when county foresters and engin- 

 eers and U. S. foresters began the sowing of 17,000 pounds of 

 mustard seed furnished by the Forest Service. The work is 

 being done by boys of the C.C.C. but over the Malibu burn the 

 seed is to be sown from an airplane. Experiments have shown 

 that mustard grows quickly after the first fall rain and affords a 

 satisfactory temporary ground cover. 



On September 2nd, at a meeting of the International Union 

 of Biological Sciences in Amsterdam, Dr. E. D. Merrill was 

 elected president, succeeding Dr. A. C. Seward, of the Univer- 

 sity of Cambridge. 



Dr. Marshall A. Howe, Director of the New York Botanical 

 Garden, has been made professor of Botany at Columbia Uni- 

 versity. 



Dr. W. H. Camp, formerly of Ohio State University, has 

 been appointed an assistant curator at the New York Botanical 

 Garden to take the place of Dr. Harold N. Moldenke who is 



