History of the Agassiz Association, 77 



vention, for example, could hardly be received and cared for by a 

 single Chapter ; nor could a wide range of local observaUons be 

 properly collated and discussed by the inhabitants of a single 

 town. It has, therefore, been deemed wise to bring about the 

 union of all the Chapters of a city or a State into more extended 

 organizations than the single Chapter. These confederations of 

 Chapters are called assemblies; the two most prominent at present 

 being the Philadelphia Assembly and the State Assembly of Iowa. 

 Embracing all the little Chapters, binding into one the larger 

 and more powerful assemblies, and making room also for individ- 

 uals when Chapters cannot be formed, is an Agassiz Association. 

 There are 986 Chapters, 46 Assemblies, but only one Association. 

 And the influence and prosperity of each assembly can be in- 

 creased and perpetuated by spreading everywhere we go a knowl- 

 edge of our local work not only, and of our local organization, 

 but also, and even with more emphasis, a knowledge of our entire 

 association, with its broader membership and its further-reaching 

 aims. — Harlan H Ballard, in the Swiss Cross. 



SANTA CRUZ ISLAND. 



The Pacific Science Monthly contains the following editorial 

 note in its eleventh number : 



" E. L. Greene writes an interesting article for the December 

 number of the West American Scientist on Santa Cruz 

 Island, but he falls into some errors which we wish to correct. 

 Prof. Greene believes himself the first to explore the island 

 scientifically. The writer of this paragraph made a geological 

 reconnoissance of the island in 1876, in connection with his 

 archaeological researches for the government. The island is not 

 thirty miles long by ten wide, but twenty-one miles long, with an 

 average width of four miles. Its shore line is fifty-three miles, 

 all told. The highest elevation, instead of being a 'Httle under 

 four thousand feet,' is but about two thousand feet." 



THE U^HISTLING TREE. 



We learn from an exchange that, according to Dr. Schwein- 

 furth the Acacia fistula, which grows in dense groves in Nubia, 

 is known among the natives as the ' whistling tree.' It owes its 

 name to the fact that a gall insect selects for the site of its opera- 

 tions the ivory-white shoots, which the development of the larva 

 distorts and causes to swell at the base into a bladder-like gall, 

 about one inch in diameter. The insect, upon emerging, leaves a 

 circular hole, and the wind playing upon the shoot is said then to 

 produce a fiute like sound. 



