fashion, the manufacture of these shells is very large. In this country the work is largely done in Philadelphia and New York. A considerable quantity of the shells are shipped to France; of the more solid and perfect shells, solid buttons are made, the refuse is ground up and mixed with cement which is molded into buttons, which display in their substance myriads of brilliant particles. The compound may be more conveniently and artistically treated than the solid shell itself, as well as at less cost.

An account of" Pearl diving (for Margaritiphora californica Cpr.) in the Gulf of California" taken from the "Youth's Companion" appears in the San Francisco Bulletin for Nov. 9th, 1881. Two or three tons of fresh shells were obtained per day when weather permitted. They were allowed to die before being searched for pearls. The locality was called Bonita bay, being about fifty miles north of Loreto. The water was forty feet deep and only about one shell in one thousand contained a valuable pearl. Sharks and squids rendered diving (in a suit of rubber armor) exciting, if not dangerous.

Eleven thousand bushels of clams (Venus mercenaria L.) were sent to market by the fishermen of East Hampton, Long Island, N. Y., in 1881.

In the Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission (1. p. 21, Apr. 13th, 1881) Mr. John A. Ryder prints an extract from a letter to Mr. Tryon, by Henry Hemphill, calling attention to the valuable qualities of Glycimeris generosa Gould, as a food mollusk. It is found at Olympia, Washington Territory, and is said to resemble "scrambled eggs" in taste. They are called “Geoducks" by the urchins of Olympia, and "Kwenuks" by the Indians. The Fish Commission is investigating the question of transplanting these valuable mollusks to the east coast of the United States. In the same publication (pp. 200-201) with the title of "On the habits and distribution of the Geoduck," etc., is printed a letter from Hemphill on the same subject, in which he mentions that a large specimen will afford a pound of delicious flesh for food. They burrow very deeply into the sand, however, and do not come much above extreme low tide limits, so that it is not easy or convenient to get at them except at low spring tides. On the other hand, they are said to be finer eating than any other mollusk, not excepting the oyster.

At a recent meeting of the Harbor Commissioners in San

Francisco, the Chief Engineer reported that the San Rafael ferryslip, now six and one-half years old, was practically ruined by the teredo and would have to be replaced. Nearly all the submerged wood-work was actually destroyed.—San Francisco Bulletin.

W. N. Horton, of Olympia, W. T., has invented a plan for circumventing the teredo. He is also the inventor of a process for boring logs for water pipes and pumps. His machinery cuts out a cylinder two inches thick, from between the core and the outside of a log and of any desired caliber. By retaining the core and filling the cylindrical excavation around it with a special cement, it is thought that the ravages of the teredo would be confined to the outer part of a pile, so treated, and the core which is expected to sustain the needed weight would be protected by the cement, which in its turn would be preserved from friction by the outer coating of wood and bark.

In the Sea World elsewhere alluded to (Dec. 7th, 1881), a resumé of facts relating to the giant cuttlefishes, is given, under the title of "The Devil Fish of the Atlantic."

In the Weekly Bulletin, San Francisco, Aug. 24, 1881, in an article on "San Francisco Fishermen," it is stated, that the Octopus (0. punctatus Gabb) is largely used for food by the Italian fishermen of that port, being made into a kind of chowder with vegetables and a sauce of olive oil and lemon juice, after the intestines have been removed, and is considered as especially appropriate food for fast-days. They are also dried for export by the Chinese.

In the Gulf of California the ten-armed cuttles sometimes attack the divers for pearl oysters. One killed, while attacking a diver, had arms twelve feet long, and a body larger than a beef barrel (Ib., Nov. 9th, 1881.)

The New York Herald, of Nov. 25th, 1881, gives three columns to an account, by Mr. Morris, of the capture of an immense squid (Architenthis harveyi V.) at Portugal cove, Newfoundland, on the 10th of November, and a resumé of facts relating to these animals. The specimen in question was brought to New York. Harper's Weekly for Dec. 10th, '81, has an illustrated article on the same subject apparently by the same author.

A fictitious account of an imaginary capture of a giant squid ("Architeuthis") appears in Lippincott's Magazine, Aug., 1881, p. 124, from the pen of Mr. C. F. Holder.

"Mortality among Architeuthida." Professor Verrill (Am. Journ. Sci., XXI, p. 251, Mar., 1881) notes a strange mortality of giant squids (" Architeuthis"), which, according to Capt. J. W. Collins, occurred in Oct., 1875. Twenty or thirty specimens were found floating on the water and secured for bait by the fishing fleet. They were mostly somewhat mutilated when found.

A novel mission in England sends beautiful sea-shells, which are generally collected by children, to little sick people in homes. or hospitals. Since May, 1879, it has distributed a quarter of a million of shells from the West Indies, South Africa and Spain, as well as from the English coast.--Foote's Leisure Hour.

A specimen of Tridacna gigas Lam., weighing 528 pounds, was obtained by Professor Ward, of Rochester, New York, at Singapore. It was thirty-six inches long and twenty-seven broad, and was presented to the California State Mining Bureau, by Mr. J. Z. Davis.-S. F. Bulletin, Mar. 2d.

Erratum. By an inexplicable and unfortunate "lapsus" in this record for 1880 (p. 716), the name of W. H. Ballou was substituted for that of Rev. W. M. Beauchamp, who should have been credited with the authorship of the note on the distribution of Bythinia tentaculata in the United States (cf. AM. NAT., July, 1880, p. 523, and Mar., 1882, pp. 244–5).

:0:

THE ORGANIC COMPOUNDS IN THEIR RELATIONS TO LIFE.'

IN

BY LESTER F. WARD.

N a paper on the "Formation of the Chemical Elements," read March 29, 1879, before the Philosophical Society of Washington, I proposed the following cosmical definitions of the three principal known forms of matter:

"1. Chemical Elements.-Substances whose molecules are composed either of those of other chemical elements of less atomic weight, or of such as are too low to be capable of molar aggregation, and therefore imperceptible to sense: formed during the progress of development of star-systems at temperatures higher

1 Read before the Philosophical Society of Washington, January 28, 1882; also read before the Biological Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at Montreal, August 29, 1882.

2. Evolution of the Chemical Elements," in the Popular Science Monthly, Vol. XVIII (Felru ry, 1881), pp. 526–539.

than can be artificially produced, and hence too stable to be artificially dissociated.

"2. Inorganic Compounds.-Substances whose molecules are composed of those of chemical elements or of other inorganic compounds of lower degrees, of aggregation: formed in the later stages of the development of planets at high but artificially producible temperatures, and therefore capable of artificial decomposition; and constituting the greater part of the solid crust of cooled-off bodies, their liquid, and a portion of their gaseous envelope.

"3. Organic Compounds.—Substances whose highly complex and very unstable molecules are composed of those of chemical elements, inorganic compounds, or organic compounds of lower organization: formed on the cooled surfaces of fully developed planets at life-supporting temperatures."

In that paper I endeavored to show that the so-called chemical elements differ from one another in ways which strongly suggest the possibility that some of them may have been evolved from simpler constituents in much the same manner as the inorganic compounds are formed. These latter were therefore treated as simply forming the continuation of a uniform process of evolution, varied in its character only by the conditions of temperature affecting the globe at the period when these substances were respectively formed upon it. The passage above quoted from the same paper shows also that the development of the organic compounds was looked upon as the still further prolongation of this uniform law operating under the greatly lowered temperatures prevailing on the surface of the earth's crust after its formation. This law was further shown to be none other than that which is known to prevail in each of the higher domains of phenomena, in the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal world-the production of aggregates of higher orders of complexity through the re-compounding of units of lower degrees of simplicity. As indices of this law, and facts of primary significance, it was shown that throughout the scale, so far as traceable, even in the domain of the chemical elements, the molecules constituting each progressively more complex unit, exhibit increase of mass accompanied by decrease of stability.

The present paper will aim to take the subject up where the former left it, and to confine itself exclusively to an examination

of the last and highest of these products of Nature's alembicthe Organic Compounds.

These substances, as they exist on the globe, are for the most part products of organization, and they were long supposed to possess such subtile properties and composition as to be ever necessarily inscrutable to man. But quantitative chemistry has, within the last half century, not only succeeded in the complete analysis of all such substances obtained from organized beings, but it has also effected the synthesis, or reproduction out of their inorganic elements, of thousands of them. Thus Wöhler, Berthelot, Kolbe, Friedel, Piria, Wertheim, and others have accomplished the manufacture of such bodies as urea, formic, oxalic, lactic, and salicylic acid, numerous alcohols and ethers, glycerine, and a host of essences, including wintergreen, vanilla, mustard, cinnamon, camphor, etc., as well as alizarine and indigo dyes. These facts are sufficient to obliterate completely the line of demarkation formerly supposed to exist between the chemical constitution of inorganic and organic compounds, and when it is remembered that the latter differ as widely from one another as they do from the former in complexity, the uniform process of molecular aggregation cannot be regarded as interrupted at this stage. There is also much indirect evidence, though amounting to proof in but few cases, that the organic compounds, at least some of them, are sometimes directly formed by nature out of their inorganic constituents without the intervention of organized bodies.

These substances have their peculiar properties depending, like those of all other substances, on their molecular constitution; the artificial glycerine possesses the same sweet taste as the natural product, the manufactured spices yield the same aromas, and the laboratory dyes the same colors as those of the Orient. Many organic compounds are exceedingly complex, their molecules being relatively large, containing several thousand times as much matter as a molecule of hydrogen. Their instability, moreover, bears some proportion to their complexity. Most of them are colloidal in structure and refuse to crystallize; a few of the simpler ones, however, in which the proportion of oxygen is large, as sugar, for example, become crystalline under certain conditions.

The only element which is never absent from any of these compounds is carbon. Oxygen is almost universally present, and the