Whitney.] 
300 
[December 21, 
trouble arose from Farm Pond becoming a settling basin for the 
others in the same system, whose mud had been exposed to the 
sun during the low water of the past season. 
City Engineer Mr. H. M. Wightman said that he had adopted 
no theory to account for the questions at issue. He denied 
Dr. Barnes’s statement of the increase of the mud deposit in Farm 
Pond, a fact which was proved by comparing the accurate sound- 
ings of the pond taken by his predecessor. He thought more 
sponges had existed in Farm Pond than supposed by Mr. Yan 
Vleck, as considerable quantities, one or two pailfuls, were 
picked every day from the screens. 
Prof. S. P. Sharpies gave a brief account of the different ap- 
pearances of the cucumber taste in Boston and of similar troubles 
in different cities various in years. He said that no water supply 
in the country had been better or more carefully watched than 
that of Boston. 
After some further discussion of the subject by the above 
speakers, Dr. W. F. Whitney exhibited a skull which had been 
found in the burial caves of Coahuila, Mexico, by Dr. Edw. Palmer, 
in the explorations which he had conducted for the Peabody 
Museum ; and it was by the kind permission of the curator, Mr. 
F. W. Putnum, that the specimen was shown. 
The skull was from a man in middle life. An arrow had 
entered through the inner side of the left orbit close to the lacry- 
mal duct, pierced the septum, and merely broken through into the 
right orbit with a small portion of its edge. It was thus lodged 
close beneath the ethnoid bone, and imprisoned there by the par- 
tial closure of the entrance through a formation of new bone, 
which showed also that the man had been shot weeks or even 
months before his death. 
General Meeting. December 21 , 1881 . 
The President, Mr. S. H. Scudder, in the chair. Twenty- 
three persons present. 
