302 NATURAL SCIENCE. oct , 



Section, receive due recognition. These examples, picked at random, 

 are types of what has been done to keep pace with the march of 

 geological research. 



Without wishing to be over critical, one of his points may be 

 noticed where there is still perhaps room for improvement. It is 

 hard to see why, in the table on page 400, the Devonian should be 

 sandwiched in between the Upper and Lower Old Red Sandstone. 

 In putting forward the conjecture that stratified rocks may possibly 

 be liquefied by intense metamorphism (p. 36), a word of caution might 

 have been usefully added. Surely Dura Den is not the locality for 

 Anodontajukcsii and Palo'optens {p. g^) ; nor can there be any doubt 

 now as to the age of the Reptiliferous Sandstone of Elgin (p. 128). 

 The episodal character of the Corallian Beds is hardly brought out 

 with sufficient distinctness ; and in the question of nomenclature 

 between Neocomian and Lower Cretaceous there is something like 

 a halting between two opinions ; Glauconitic would have been better 

 than Chloritic Marl. In the case of the Upper and Middle Eocene, 

 the time has come to make their representatives in Hampshire and 

 the Isle of Wight, about which our knowledge is fairly complete, the 

 type, in place of the Bagshots of the London Basin, about which w^e 

 know (pace Dr. Irving) scarcely anything. In the case of the 

 Oligocene, more might have been said about the great earth move- 

 ments which culminated towards the end of that epoch. Some 

 objection may be taken to what is said about the shell-bearing gravels 

 of Macclesfield. It is hardly possible for anyone who has seen these 

 beds in section and collected their fossils to believe they can have 

 been driven up by an ice-sheet from an adjoining sea bottom. The 

 perfect state of many of the shells may be accounted for by supposing 

 that they were frozen into the matrix during their journey. But any- 

 one who has noted the bedding and current-bedding of the gravel can 

 hardly fail to be convinced that they are subaqueous deposits laid 

 down where we now find them. That the shells indicate different 

 depths of water is natural, for the gravels were probably formed 

 during subsidence and an increasing depth of the sea. 



The later chapters, though judiciously modified, are happily 

 allowed to retain much that gave to the book from the first its dis- 

 tinctive character. Lastly, by omissions, none of any serious moment, 

 and rearrangements, often resulting in manifest improvement, the 

 book has been reduced from 639 to 421 pages. 



A. H. Green. 



The Royal Natural History. Edited by Richard Lydekker, B.A., F.R.S. 

 London; Frederick Warne & Co., 1894. In monthly parts. Each, price one 

 shilHng nett. 



Ten numbers of this interesting popular Natural History have now 

 been published, and the public, Mr. Lydekker, and Messrs. Warne 

 and Company must be congratulated. The get-up of the volume is 

 all one could wish for, and the illustrations, of which some are taken 

 from Brehm's well-known " Thierleben," while others are specially 

 prepared for this work, are a great improvement on anything that has 

 been published before. The coloured pictures, on the whole, we do 

 not care for, though some of them are well done. The first two parts 

 of the work are devoted to the monkeys, the third to the lemurs 

 and bats, the fourth to the hedgehogs, moles, and cats, which latter 

 continue into the fifth, and are succeeded by the genets, civets, and 



