NOTES AND COMMENT 



321 



timonials of plate to Professor H. C. Cowles, Dr. Geo. E. Nichols and 

 Geo. D. Fuller. 



The members of the Excursion had been the guests of the Carnegie 

 Institution during the previous week at the Coastal Laboratory at 

 Carmel, California, and at the Salton Sea. During the week following 

 the anniversary date, subsistence, tentage and transportation were fur- 

 nished to a party of thirty traversing the desert to the base of the Santa 

 Catalina Mountains, and making the ascent to the summit of Mt. Lem- 

 mon and the Montane plantation. Ample opportunity was given for 

 observations and discussion of factors affecting distribution, including 

 temperature and evaporation gradients, origin and development of 

 formations and the physical and physiological facts implied in concep- 

 tions of chaparral, desert, steppe, forest, etc. 



The establishment of the Desert Laboratory was authorized by the 

 Trustees of the Carnegie Institution late in 1902. Messrs. F. V. Coville 

 and D. T. MacDougal selected a site at Tucson in February, 1903, and 

 after citizens had contributed two hundred acres of land and other con- 

 cessions, a laboratory was erected and Dr. W. A. Cannon as Resident 

 Investigator took over the building and began work in September, 

 1903. 



The Department of Botanical Research was created by the Trustees 

 in December, 1905, and Dr. D. T. MacDougal was appointed Director, 

 with headquarters at the Desert Laboratory. The equipment has been 

 extended to include the Coastal Laboratory' at Carmel, California, and 

 experimental plantations at various places, and the Department sustains 

 relations with a large number of collaborators in various institutions. 



Mr. Alan G. Ogilvie, of the School of Geography of Oxford Univer- 

 sity, read a paper at the June meeting of the Royal Geographical Society 

 on Impressions of the Vegetation in the United States (The Geograph- 

 ical Journal, October, 1913). Mr. Ogilvie was one of the delegates of 

 the Society to the Transcontinental Excursion of the American Geo- 

 graphical Society in 1912, and his paper describes vividly the transi- 

 tions of vegetation which are observable in crossing the continent. 



