"214 The Scottish Natiii'alist. 



the short-lived Sutherland diggings of 1869, in regard to that 

 northern gold-field. 



6. But, unfortunately, however desirable it is both as a social 

 or economic, and as a mineralogical or scientific question, to 

 institute systematic operations in the Leadhills district, there are 

 the same kinds of difficulties to be encountered as in Suther- 

 land.^ 



E E V I E W S. 



Transactions of the Glasgow Society pf Field Naturalists, Part V. 



Published by the Society. Glasgow : 1877, — This Part of the ' Transactions 

 of the Glasgow Field Naturalists' Society ' is, as usual, well got up, but 

 ought more properly to have been entitled " Proceedings " rather than 

 "Transactions," as, with one or two exceptions, brief abstracts only are 

 given of the papers read. Of the papers given at greater length, one by Mr 

 A. S. Wilson, "On the probable Reasons why certain Plants occur most 

 frequently in the vicinity of Human Dwellings," deserves notice. There is 

 also a paper by Dr Stirton upon "Additions to the Lichen Flora of South 

 Africa," which will commend itself to the attention of lichenologists, but 

 seems to us rather out of place in these Transactions. We would suggest that 

 it would be an improvement if in future parts the use of the terms "rare" 

 and " very rare " was not so frequent, or at least applied only to species which 

 really deserve it. 



Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Glasgow, Vol. III. 

 Part II. Glasgow: 1877. Pp. 97-220. — Like the Transactions just men- 

 tioned, this Part is, like former ones, well got up, with good paper and clear 

 type. It includes the proceedings of the Society from September 1876 to 

 April 1877 ; and as twenty-nine papers by thirteen or fourteen authors are 

 given more or less in full, the volume merits the name of "Transactions" as 

 well as " Proceedings." Most of the papers are zoological, and are almost all 

 on vertebrates or insects, though Professor Young and Mr Young notice fossil 

 species of some of the other sub-kingdoms, and Mr David Robertson has a 

 note or two upon Mollusca. The latter gentleman is credited in the table of 

 contents with the discovery of two species of fresh-water mollusca new to 

 Scotland — viz., Plauorbis complanatiis and Pisidmin foiiiinak ; but on turning 

 to his paper, we find that he alludes to the fact of PI. complanatns (under its 

 synonym marginatiis) having already been recorded in the Society's Proceed- 

 ings (i. 247, and ' Sc. Nat.' ii. 207), and that it is the var. Hmslozvianuvi of 

 Pisidinm fontinalc that is meant. Pisidmvi fontinale is of course a well- 

 known Scottish shell, but we believe the var. in question ha? not hitherto 



^ These difficulties were described in a paper laid before the British As- 

 sociation in 1869, under the title of ' The Sutherland Gold Diggings as a 

 Scientific and Social Experiment.' 



