Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 88.djvu/106

78 by a joint committee, appointed for the purpose.

Secretary McAdoo has recently modified the work of destroying the paper money so as to meet present conditions better. Now each member of the committee will check the money and securities delivered as well as witness their destruction. In the past, one member of the committee has usually verified the amount and the whole committee merely witnessed the destruction. The new regulations are designed to simplify the work and throw greater safeguards around the destruction of money and securities. The record shows that the paper money destroyed in 1915 had a total weight of five hundred and ninety tons.



HE term "gull" is usually associated in the popular mind only with long-winged swimmers seen along the salt water shores and in coast harbors. There are represented in the United States, however, twenty-two species or sub-species of gulls, including the gull-like birds known as skuas and jaegers. Of these some are true inland birds, frequenting prairies, marshes, and inland lakes. Flocks of gulls on the waters of our harbors or following the wake of vessels are a familiar sight, but not every observer of the graceful motions of the bird is aware of the fact, that gulls are the original "white wings."

As sea scavengers they welcome as food dead fish, garbage, and offal of various sorts, and their services in cleaning up such material are not to be regarded lightly. It will, however, surprise many to learn that some of the gull family render important inland service, especially to agriculture. At least one species, the California gull, is extremely fond of field mice, and during an outbreak of that pest in Nevada in 1907-8 hundreds of gulls assembled in and near the devastated alfalfa fields and fed entirely on mice, thus lending the farmers material aid in their warfare against the pestiferous little rodents.

In Salt Lake City, is a monument surmounted by two bronze gulls, erected by the people of that city "in grateful remembrance" of the signal service rendered by these birds at a critical time in the history of the community. For three consecutive years—1848, 1849. and 1850—black crickets by millions threatened to ruin the crops upon which depended the very lives of the settlers. Large flocks of gulls came to the rescue and devoured vast numbers of the destructive insects, until the fields were entirely freed from them.