626 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



vapours ; the remains of these latter being subsequently carried 

 down to the lowlands by floods. No reference, it may be added, 

 is made to the comparatively fresh condition in which moa- 

 remains have been found in many districts, or to their alleged 

 association with Maori camping-places or camp-fires. 



Bird-remains from the Argentine Tertiaries have been re- 

 ferred to in an earlier portion of the present article. 



To Prof. S. W. Williston, of Chicago University, may be 

 accorded the credit ol having given to the world by far the 

 most readable and interesting book on recent and fossil reptiles 

 that has ever appeared. Well illustrated, and containing 

 251 pages of letterpress, it bears the title of Water-Reptiles of 

 the Past and Present, and is published by the Chicago University 

 Press. In the preface the author states that he offers the work, 

 to the best of his ability, " as an authoritative and accurate 

 account of some of the creatures of earlier days which sought 

 new opportunities by going down from the land into the 

 water." No fewer than fifteen ordinal groups of reptiles are 

 recognised, of which the great majority (excluding, of course, 

 pterodactyles, and likewise dinosaurs) have purely aquatic 

 representatives. Of some, indeed, like ichthyosaurs, the 

 ancestral terrestrial forerunners are still unknown, or at all 

 events not known with certainty ; but in the case of the others 

 the probable line of descent of the aquatic from terrestrial types 

 is traced with a masterly hand. Like Prof. Osborn, the author 

 is convinced that the earliest reptiles were terrestrial; and it is 

 to be hoped that the appearance of his work will put an end 

 to the nonsense that has been written about the aquatic 

 ancestry of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. 



Perhaps the most interesting papers on fossil reptiles 

 published during 1914 are two which appeared in the Aeronautical 

 Journal for October, No. 72 (pp. 1-20), in the first of which 

 Messrs. E. H. Hankin and D. M. S. Watson discuss the nature 

 of the flight of pterodactyles, as deduced from their anatomical 

 structure, while in the second Mr. G. H. Short takes into 

 consideration their wing-adjustment. From the structure of 

 their skeleton, it is considered that these reptiles were more 

 specially adapted for flight than any other vertebrate animals ; 

 the largest of them, with bodies not much bigger than that 

 of a cat, having a wing-span of about 21 feet. Moreover, they 

 were unable to fold their wings against the sides of the body, 



