PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. 495 
Professor EDWARD S. MORSE also made a communication **On Brach- 
iopods as a division of the Annulata.” A brief abstract of these views was 
published in the July number of this magazine. A few new facts have 
been added which have been noticed under the description of Lingula. 
g a sc n e 
bilobed lophophore of its young, as described by Kowalewsky, as further 
proofs of the annulate character of the Brachiopods. 
Dr. Tuomas HILL read a paper on ** The Compass Plant." In J une, 1869, 
Dr. Hill was coming from Omaha to Chicago, on a very dark rainy day, so 
dark that he could not form any estimate of the points of compass from 
the sunlight. At three different points on the prairies he noticed young 
plants of Silphium laciniatum, and estimated from them, while going at 
full speed, the course of the railway track. On reaching Chicago he 
procured by the kindness of the officers of the C. & N. W. road, detailed 
maps of the track, and found where he had estimated the zog at 359, 
75°, and 90°, the true bea arings were 31°, 78°, and 90° 
In October, 1869, being detained by an accident wn Tama, he gathered 
with fourteen leaves. Ten of these fourteen leaves showed a strong dis- 
position, when about four inches high, to turn to the meridian; the other 
four showed a feeble disposition in the same direction. These ten leaves 
on coming up in June, had an average bearing of 42°, and the mean bear- 
ing was nearly as large. But in August, the same ten leaves showed an 
average bearing of only 44°, and the mean bearing was but 24°. 
r. Hill refers this polarity to the sunlight, the two sides of the leaf 
boli equally estre and struggling for equal shares. He hoped in a 
more favorable summer to test this, and several other points which had 
S: 
Professor James ORTON read a paper upon the ** Condor and the Hum- 
ming Birds of the Equatorial Region." He remarked that probably no 
bird is so unfortunate in the hands of the curious and scientific as the 
Condor. Fifty years have elapsed since the first specimen reached Eu- 
peated in many of our text books, and the very latest ornithological 
e 
can lift an elephant from the ground high enough to kill it by the fall ; 
nor the story of the traveller, so late as 1830, who declared that a Condor 
y fee s or even 
equals twelve feet. Ihave a full grown male from the most celebrated 
locality in the Andes, and the stretch of its wings is nine feet. Humboldt 
