Correspondence. 261: 
in regarding Aulopora cornuta Bill., as really founded upon fragments 
of the present species. I have, however, various specimens which seem, 
to belong to Aulopora cornuta as regards their general characters, 
but which agree with Aulopora proper in being parasitic ; so that I 
must at present leave the identity of this form with Romingeria um- 
bellifera an open question." It would be valuable to know what the 
stolon of ihe R. nmbellifera specimens described by Beecher would have 
been like. 
In Neues Jahrbuch* there is a description of both stolonal and ma- 
turer growth of a Romingeria (R. cf. umbellifera). Beecher overlook;, 
this in his review, though his "receipt of your valuable paper" is at 
hand. Since this paper is not in English it may be well to repeat part 
of the description here. The best specimen was a silicified colony, the 
size of a man's fist from Red Rock Pass, Idaho. The cells or corallites 
grew first horizontally. The mother cell and the bud diverged and 
each after converging into contact with some other cell once, grew then 
vertically. New budded cells from vertical mother cells did not 
form a horizontal stolonal part but grew divergingly upwards. 
If Beecher has specimens of R. umbellifera showing the first polyp 
of the colony and no stolon, this would be an important fact to men- 
tion, and in absence of it some conservative feeling is due. His new 
species may be well founded, even though he may not have followed the 
same policy with Rominger and Nicholson in this particular case, 
and yet a person might be permitted I think to urge the advantage of 
conservative policy with such corals as Romingeria, of which a single 
species could be expected to build only large regular colonies under 
most favorable conditions and only smaller, irregular ones under ad- 
versity, and for which one locality may well have afforded one con- 
dition, and others the different ones. 
FREDERICK W. SARDESOX. 
iolis, Sept. 3, 1903. 
Fteld Geology in Ohio State University. An elective course in 
Field Geology for upper classmen and graduate students is given each 
spring term by professor Prosser. The course, which is designed to 
acquaint the student with the methods of field investigation, requires 
field and laboratory study of the geological formations of Ohio, and in- 
volves the collection and identification of rocks and fossils, the measure- 
ment of sections, and the preparation of a report describing the localities 
studied. In connection with this work not a little addition has been 
made to the knowledge of the stratigraphical geology of Ohio. For the 
last term sixteen students registered in the course, every Saturday was 
spent in the field, and, with the exception of the Waterlime, every form- 
ation in the state from the top of the Richmond into the lower part of 
the Conemaugh was studied in the field. 
* Neues Jahrbuch fur Mineralogic, Geologic und Palaeontologic Beil.-Bd. 
x, p 327. 
