Read Ebook: Proceedings of the California Academy of Sciences Volume III 1863-1867 by Various

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Spikelets very large, secund, horizontal, four to six-flowered; flowers stipitate, upper ones imperfect and abortive, slightly tinged with purple.

Glumes equal, oblong, membranaceous, five-nerved; nerves evanescent at about three-quarters the length of the glumes; scarious margined and pointed, nearly the length of the flowers.

Paleae very unequal, chartaceous; lower oblong, seven-nerved, all except the middle one evanescent at about two-thirds the length of the palea; scabrous, largely scarious margined and pointed; upper palea spathulate, bicarinate, ciliate, one-third shorter than the lower.

Ovary obovate, contracted near the truncated apex, sessile, smooth; styles terminal, divergent; stigmas plumose; pilis fasciculate, minutely serrate; squammulae very small, connate, entire; stamens three; caryopsis?

Root perennial; culms upright, terate, striate, one and one-half feet high, very brittle; sheaths striate, scabrous; ligula exserted, lacerated; leaves narrow, one-sixteenth to two-sixteenths of an inch wide, acuminate, outside and margins scabrous, striately nerved, upright, nearly appressed.

Raceme upright, rather simple; branchlets smooth, appressed, few-flowered; pedicels pubescent at the angle.

Collected by Mr. George W. Dunn, at Silver City, Nevada Territory.

REGULAR MEETING, FEBRUARY 2D, 1863.

President in the Chair.

Present, fourteen members.

Prof. P. P. Carpenter, of Manchester, England, was elected a Corresponding Member.

Donations to the Cabinet were received as follows:

Three jars of reptiles and fishes, collected by Mr. J. Xantus, in Lower California, and mostly near Cape St. Lucas, were presented by Mr. Samuel Hubbard.

Donations to the Library:

Volumes 1-27 of the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, by H. G. Bloomer. Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, for October, November, and December, 1862, from the Society. Descriptions of shells collected in the Rocky Mountains in 1860 by Dr. J. G. Cooper, by T. Bland and J. G. Cooper.

The Publishing Committee laid volume two of the Proceedings of the Academy, for the years 1858-62, upon the table: it was ordered by the Academy that one hundred copies be sold to the members at one dollar per copy, and that fifty copies be presented to the Smithsonian Institution for foreign distribution.

Professor Whitney read the following communication:

On the Inaccuracy of the Eighth Census, so far as it Relates to the Metallic and Mineral Statistics of the United States.

BY J. D. WHITNEY.

It has, for a long time, been a subject of regret, that our United States Census returns are so imperfect; and that, in all that relates to mining and metallurgy, they are especially and extraordinarily unreliable. Mr. Kennedy's "Preliminary Report on the Eighth Census," , recently issued, is at hand, and some remarks may here be made in reference to what appears in it, which is connected with our mineral interests. It will soon appear, from an examination of this public document, that the same unfortunate ignorance in regard to one of the most important of the sources of our national wealth, which has characterized previous Census Reports, still prevails among our officials at Washington; and that all which Mr. Kennedy's Report contains must be taken with many grains of allowance. It is certainly the duty of those who are better posted to give notice of these deficiencies, and to call public attention to them again and again, in the hope that something may be done, hereafter, to make this department of the Government less ridiculous in the eyes of those who are acquainted with such matters, and less liable to mislead those who look on a Census Report as something to be blindly quoted, and relied on as a document which must necessarily be correct.

The only metals in regard to which anything is stated in Mr. Kennedy's report are iron, nickel, lead, zinc, and copper; thus omitting gold, silver, and quicksilver, of each of which we are large producers. Of the mineral productions, coal is the only one noticed.

The first metal mentioned in the text accompanying the tables compiled from the Census returns is iron, and the quantity of pig iron produced in 1860 is given at 884,474 tuns, valued at ,487,790, and this is stated to be an increase in the value returned by the Census of 1850, of 44?4 per cent.

Here the question arises, how far are these figures to be relied on as accurate? This can only be decided by comparison with returns known to be approximately accurate, and of these we have none later than the year 1856, in which year the make of pig iron was ascertained, by the Iron-Makers' Association, to be 812,917 tuns. Either the Census returns of 1860 are too low, as they were in 1850, or else the increase in this branch of our industry has been very slight since 1849, when the make of iron was ascertained by the Pennsylvania Iron-Masters to be 800,000 tuns. On the other hand, assuming the Census returns of 1860 to be correct, there is no ground for making the statement, as is done by Mr. Kennedy, that there has been an increase of 44?4 per cent. in the value of the iron produced in 1860 over that of 1850; it is evident that the increase has been very slight, since 1846 or 1847 even, in which years the make of this metal, on reliable authority, reached nearly 800,000 tuns.

But what shall we say of Mr. Kennedy's method of arriving at the production of iron, as related to the amount of population in the United States, or the number of pounds produced per head? To obtain this, he adds together the amount of pig iron and the amount of bar and other wrought iron produced, and thus obtains a result of 92 pounds of iron produced for each inhabitant of the United States; which, as he says, "speaks volumes for the progress of the nation in all its industrial and material interests." It speaks a volume or two for his own ignorance of the elements of metallurgy; since, as everybody, except the Superintendent of the United States Census, knows, the bar and rolled iron is nearly all converted from the pig, and only a small proportion made direct from the ore; so that his method of computation is as near correct as it would be, for instance, to estimate the amount of beef consumed per head in San Francisco, by adding the weight of all the cattle slaughtered in the city to that of the beef produced by said slaughtering. As, in 1856, only 28,433 tuns of bar iron were made directly from the ore, to 812,917 of pig produced; so, allowing that 28,000 tuns were made direct in 1860, the amount, per head, of all the iron made in that year would be 65 pounds, instead of 92, as Mr. Kennedy calculates. Taking the population of the United States at 23,000,000, in 1850, and the make of iron at 800,000 tuns, as given by the returns of the Commission of the Iron-Masters of Pennsylvania, the amount produced, per head, in that year, would be 78 pounds; so that all Mr. Kennedy's glorification goes for naught, unless we admit that his returns for 1860 are wrong.

In regard to the statistics of the other metals mentioned in the Census Report, it may be said, with truth, that they are very defective. No mention is made of gold, silver, or mercury, the value of the first-named of which produced in this country is nearly double that of all the other metals. Under zinc, there is no mention made of New Jersey, the great zinc-producing State. The yield of lead in the Mississippi Valley is put down at considerably less than its real amount.

The table given by Mr. Kennedy does not state what amounts of each metal are produced; and, if we attempt to arrive at them by examining the columns of values, it is found to be impossible to decide whether these values are those of the ore as mined before being smelted, or of the metals produced from them. In short, the whole matter is left in such obscurity, that it is much to be wished that the table could be expunged from the Report, as it can only serve to mislead and confuse those who resort to Government documents for information in regard to our metallic and mineral productions.

In point of fact, the amount of bar iron made in the bloomery furnaces direct from the ore is growing less every year, and must be now reduced to a very small figure.

Dr. Cooper remarked that, since the publication of his paper on Californian Mollusca, read before the Academy November 3d, 1862, he finds the generic name STRATEGUS preoccupied, and he now proposes, in its place, the name NAVARCHUS.

Baron Richthofen remarked, that gold occurs associated with mispickel in Silesia.

Mr. R. L. Harris made some remarks on the comparative friction of car-wheels, on an iron track, when rolling and sliding, as shown by experiments made on the street-railroad in Washington street. Here the greatest grade is five hundred and twenty-eight feet per mile, or one in ten, and it is found that, on a wet day, if the wheels are stopped by the brakes, they will slide on the track; while, if the brakes are not put down so hard but that the wheels can revolve, the car is entirely under control. This is not the popular opinion, and the authorities generally state, that the sliding friction is the greatest; but experience shows, that the friction is really greatest when the sliding and rolling motions are combined.

REGULAR MEETING, FEBRUARY 16TH, 1863.

President in the Chair.

Fourteen members present.

Donations to the Cabinet were received as follows:

From J. E. Clayton, Esq., a set of ores from the Russ District, California.

Donations to the Library:

Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for the year 1857: from Dr. Cooper. Astronomical and Meteorological Observations, made at the U. S. Naval Observatory during the year 1861: from the U. S. Naval Observatory.

Dr. Kellogg read the following paper:

Description of two New Species of Plants from Nevada Territory.

BY A. KELLOGG, M.D.

APLOPAPPUS Cass.

Suffrutescent, caudex branching, branches three to four inches in height, somewhat ascending; rigid, striate, scabrous throughout. Heads solitary and terminal, homochromous and many-flowered. Leaves alternate, crowded near the base, oblanceolate, very acute, quite entire, three-nerved; the reticulate veins and nerves prominent, sub-petiolate ; the lowermost leaves more distinctly petiolate, spatulate, obtuse, or sub-acute; upper cauline leaves few or solitary, lanceolate, very acute or acuminate, three-nerved.

Involucre campanulate, the greenish somewhat foliaceous scales rigid, many-nerved, margins scarious, cleft-ciliate, or somewhat fimbriate, oblanceolate, acute, in three series, often one or two bractoid scales at the base.

Receptacle flat, alveolate; alveoli toothed, naked. Rays orange-yellow, oblong-oval, two or three-toothed, pistillate, fertile, tube slender, about as long as the achenia, or one-third to half the length of the ligule.

Disk corolla cylindrical, slightly expanding, five-toothed, erect, glabrous. The achenia angular, oblong, somewhat compressed; base cuneate, satiny appressed pubescent ; pappus of unequal capillary scabrous bristles, rigid and fragile, or deciduous.

Appendages of the style much longer than the stigmatic portion, lance-subulate, hispid, much exsert, erect-spreading.

This plant was brought from Nevada Territory by Mr. Herbert C. Dorr.

MIRABILIS L.

Stem about a foot in height, somewhat ascending, flexuous, divaricately branching, nodose, internodes slightly curved; minutely villous throughout. Leaves rounded-cordate, obtuse, entire, three to five-nerved; the uppermost ovate-cordate, petioles short, .

Flowers pedicellate, in loose terminal dichotomous panicles, with a solitary flower in the axils; perigonium pink, pedicels recurved in fruit.

This plant, from the interior--Devil's Gate and Carson River--differs much from the plate of the coast plant of the Mexican Boundary Report. It is not at all "glabrous," nor are the flowers "sub-sessile;" the pairs of leaves are remote, with a much more open and spreading aspect; the flowers are pentandrous and deciduous.

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