4 
216 Jumping Seeds and Galls. [ April, 
miles. Another immense area occurs along the Yellowstone, ex- 
tending from its mouth nearly up to the Big Horn River, or for 
several hundred miles, as well as for long distances up its lower 
tributaries. The valleys of the Rosebud, Tongue, and Powder 
rivers are, indeed, among the most noteworthy localities of these 
metamorphic phenomena, the hills being sometimes reddened as 
far as the eye can reach by the burning out of the lignite beds. 
This metamorphism is, in short, almost coextensive with the 
lignitic tertiary formation of the Upper Missouri, which occupies 
an area some five hundred miles in length by about three hun- 
dred and fifty in breadth, extending from near the 100th to 
about the 108th meridian, and from the vicinity of the 43d to 
far beyond the 49th parallel. Within this region, however, are 
occasional districts where this metamorphism occurs only in the 
higher, scattered buttes, the great areas of this disturbance and 
change being the borders of the principal water-courses, as the 
Missouri and its southern tributaries between the above-named 
points, including the Yellowstone and its eastern affluents. 
ens Sena 
JUMPING SEEDS AND GALLS. 
A a late meeting of the Academy of Sciences of St. Louis, 
Mr. C. V. Riley exhibited certain seeds which possessed & 
hidden power of jumping and moving about on the table. He 
stated that he had recently received them from Mr. G. W. 
Barnes, of San Diego, Cal., and that they were generally known 
by the name of “ Mexican jumping seeds.” They are probably 
derived from a tricoccous euphorbiaceous plant. Each of the 
seeds measures about one third of an ineh in length, and has two 
pat sides, meeting at an obtuse angle, and a third broader, con- 4 
vex side, with a medial carina. If cut open, each is found to 
contain a single fat, whitish worm, which has eaten all the eon- : 
tents of the seed and lined the shell with a delicate carpet of silk. : 
The worm very closely resembles the common apple worm ( Car- 
pocapsa pomonella), and indeed is very closely related, the in- 4 
sect being known to science as Carpocapsa saltitans. It was 
first recorded by Westwood in the Proceedings of the Ashmo- 
lean Society of Oxford, in 1857 (iii. 187, 138), and repeatedly 
referred to under the name of Carpocapsa Dehaisiana in the ‘ 
Annales of the French Entomological Society for 1859. 
The egg of the moth is doubtless laid on the young pod, which 
contains the three angular seeds, and the worm gnaws into the suc- 
