506 General Notes. [ August, 
quantity required. Various cries, of what indicative. Natural means ' 
of offense and defense, and how employed. General disposition, traits, 
characteristics. Methods of capturing or destroying, of taming or do- 
mesticating. Economic relations with man ; how injurious or beneficial, 
to what extent, used for what purposes, yielding what products of value. 
Specimens, after examination by the undersigned for the purposes of the 
work in hand, will be deposited, in the name of the donor, in the 
Army Medical Museum or in the National Museum. Address Dr. 
Elliott Coues, Office of United States Geological and Geographical 
Survey of the Territories, Washington, 
— The Netherlands Zodlogical Association have founded an establish- 
ment on the Dutch coast, where investigations of the fauna and flora of 
the North Sea can be carried on at leisure. The building is made of 
wood, and can be transported from one place to another, according to 
season and varying abundance of material for study. 
— In some parts of California the tomato is perennial. A resident at 
Los Angeles now (February) gathers ripe tomatoes from the top of a 
twenty-foot ladder. The vine, which is twenty-five feet high, has been 
trained on the sunny side of the house, and shows blossoms and fruit in 
every stage of growth. 
—In various parts of California experiments are being made in a 
small way with the cork-bark oak; and the trees are reported thus far 
as doing well. In Santa Barbara a fine, large, and thrifty specimen may 
be seen in a garden, which has grown from a seed planted twenty-two 
years ago. 
—A farmer in Tulare County, California, has been in the habit of 
_ using for fuel the stalks of castor-beans growing on his ranch, and finds 
them a very ready and desirable substitute for wood, the trunks of the 
larger ones being about the size of a man’s leg. The immense growth 
of this plant in a single year and its prolific bearing qualities make it 4 
desirable crop. 
—Mr. D. G. Elliot is about to publish in London two monographs, 
one on the Felide, including both the living and extinct species; the 
other on the Bucerotide, or Hornbills. 
— Mr. Robert J. Creighton, resident agent in San Francisco for New 
Zealand, shipped early in February, by the Zealandia, a box of white- 
fish eggs, containing 180,000, on account of that colony. This 1s the 
second shipment of white-fish eggs to New Zealand, obtained through the 
United States Fish Commissioners, who pack and ship them from Lake 
Michigan to San Francisco. Mr. Creighton likewise forwarded for the 
same colony a parcel of trout eggs from the Cold Spring Trout Ponds, 
Charlestown, New Hampshire, and Mr. Hugh Craig, agent of the New 
Zealand Ins. Co., forwards on account of the Auckland Acclimatization 
_ Society two California deer and twenty-seven short-tailed grouse trom 
Utah Territory. By the next steamer Mr. Craig will forward prairie 
