Personal and Scientific Neivs. 389 
state of Colorado, has been arranged with the cooperation of 
Messrs. S. F. Emmons and Whitman Cross. 
Explorations in Alaska. It is reported that the United 
States Geological Survey will send three expeditions to Alaska 
this summer. The first, under J. Vv'. Peters, will start from 
Bergman, nearly 1,000 miles northwest of Sitka, and proceed 
to the Arctic ocean. The party hopes to advance eastward as 
far as the British boundary and will then turn westward again 
and proceed toward point Barrow. The second party, led by 
W. C. Mendenhall, will work in the vicinity of Kotzebue sound. 
The third party, led by AI. Gerdine, will continue explorations 
in the region of Copper river. 
The Department of Vertebrate Palaeontology of the 
American Museum of Natural History will have three parties 
in the field this season under the general direction of professor 
H. F. Osborn. One will continue the work in the Pleiocene 
beds of the ]Mt. Blanco region in Texas, where so many and 
such fine remains of mastodons, horses and camels have been 
found bv the museum parties in recent years. The second 
party will continue the excavation of the celebrated Bone Cabin 
quarry in the Como district of Wyoming, while the third party 
will prosecute the collection of dinosaurian remains in the 
Bl^Lck Hills region of South Dakota and \Vyoming. 
Lehigh University, at South Bethlehem, Pa., publishes a 
list of the titles of theses to be presented by candidates for 
degrees, June, 1901. This list gives sixty-one titles. They 
are almost wholly scientific. The exceptions are two, one de- 
voted to the modern meaning of socialism and the other lo 
Chaucer's "Prologue." Xine are in the course of mining engi- 
neering and the remainder, which is the larger half, are in 
some line of engineering or in chemistry. Not one is devoted 
to any phase of geology, nor to mineralogy^ nor to any ques- 
tion of petrography. It seems anomalous that in a mining 
state like Pennsylvania, whose geology has furnished many of 
the important elements of the science in America, a university 
of such scope and standing could graduate a scientific class of 
sixty-one without evincing any sign of geology in the final 
theses. 
Geological Society of \\'ashington. At the meeting of 
this society on April 24, Mr. G. P. Merrill exhibited specimens 
of the so-called Moldavites from Bohemia and Moravia and 
gave a brief resume of the views of various writers as to their 
supposed meteoric nature. He also exhibited weathered peb- 
bles of obsidian from several localities in the arid west which 
showed corroded surfaces suggestively similar, and which he 
regarded as produced bv natural temperature variations and 
the corrosive action of the atmosphere. 
At the same meeting was exhibited a preliminary sketch for 
