Botany. 239 



From three drumlins of Nantasket, namely, Telegraph Hill, 

 Point Allerton Great Hill, and Sti-awberry Hill, situated five to 

 seven miles southeast of Winthrop, Professor Crosby and Mr. 

 H. D. Card have collected eleven species, the first locality hav- 

 ing eight ; the second also eight, of which five are found in the 

 first ; and the third five, of which four are in each of the two 

 other sections. Only one of these species, Cmcibidum striatum 

 Say, found only in Telegraph Hill, is an addition beyond the 

 collections of Stimpson, Dodge, and Herman. 



The section of the Winthrop Great Head has the highest ver- 

 tical extent, and therefore affords the most favorable conditions 

 for the preservation of the shell fragments, among all the sec- 

 tions of drumlins in the Boston Harbor district, excepting only 

 the comparatively inaccessible sections of Great Brewster island. 

 To this fact, and to probably more frequent and persistent search 

 than elsewhere, we must ascribe, as I think, the larger list of its 

 discovered species, rather than to greater abundance, either in 

 numbers or in species, of the shells originally supplied to the 

 drift there. 



When my previous paper relating to these fossils was contrib- 

 uted to this Journal in May, 1889, I considered them as derived 

 from an interglacial fauna ; but it now seems to me more proba- 

 ble that there was no great retreat and re-advance of this portion 

 of the North American ice-sheet, so that these fossils, and the 

 two successive faunas, comprising together about sixty species, at 

 Sankaty Head, Nantucket, would be preglacial. None of these 

 species, however, have become extinct, or undergone important 

 varietal modification, from which it seems certain that no geo- 

 logically long period has elapsed since their time. In other 

 words, if they are preglacial, the Ice age here, and the epeiro- 

 genic uplift which appears to have produced it (this Journal, vol. 

 xlvi, pp. 114-121, Aug., 1893), so far as it affected this part of 

 our coast, were each brief. The uplift, however, farther north- 

 east and north, occupied a much longer time, as is shown by the 

 Fishing Banks and the northern fjords, after which I think that 

 it reached to the latitudes of Boston, New York, Delaware Bay, 

 and beyond, during only a comparatively short stage, when its 

 culmination caused the accumulation of the ice-sheet. That the 

 temperature of the sea at the head of Massachusetts Bay was 

 milder than now, both preceding and following the glaciation, 

 may probably be accounted for, in part or wholly, by the more 

 enclosed and sheltered position of this bay and the whole coast 

 of eastern New England and the eastern provinces of Canada, 

 due to-greater height of the Fishing Banks, Newfoundland, and 

 the region of the Strait of Belle Isle. 



III. Botany. 



r 



1. Etude sur la constitution de Vappariel fructificateur des 

 Sphenophyllum. By R. Zeiller. Mem. soc. geol. France, paleont., 

 No. 11, Paris, 1893, pp. 1-39, PI. I-III.— Although cones of a 



