i8 93 . NOTES AND COMMENTS. 93 



The Geological Survey of Queensland has recently issued a 

 report on " Geological Observations in British New Guinea in 1891," 

 by A. Gibb Maitland, with three maps and two plates of sections. 

 The formations now known are, besides coral reefs and surface 

 deposits, the Post-Tertiary Kevori Grits, the supposed Tertiary Port 

 Moresby Beds, and the Boioro Limestones of undetermined age, with 

 metamorphic and igneous rocks. The coral rocks present no features 

 of special interest. The Boioro Limestones are doubtfully placed 

 beneath the Port Moresby Beds, and Mr. Maitland discovered no 

 fossils ; they sometimes contain flint nodules. Useful details are 

 given, and the report concludes with a bibliography. 



Palaeontologists will be glad to learn that Professor K. A. von 

 Zittel has now completed his Handbuch der Palaontologie, and the last 

 two parts will shortly be issued. His general account of the distri- 

 bution of the extinct mammalia has just been published in advance 

 in the Sitzungsberichte of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and a 

 translation will shortly appear in the Geological Magazine. So valuable 

 a comparison of the extinct mammalian faunas of different parts of 

 the globe cannot fail to arouse a considerable amount of interest 

 among those who have specially studied the subject of distribution ; 

 and the general survey now before us is one that has long been 

 urgently required. 



Commencing with the view that during the Secondary period 

 the entire globe was inhabited by Multituberculates and Polyproto- 

 dont Marsupials, Dr. von Zittel considers that early in the Tertiary 

 three great centres of mammalian development and dispersion were 

 established. The centres in question were (1) Australia, (2) South 

 America, and (3) Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America. 

 Commenting on the alleged connection of South America, South 

 Africa, and Australia by means of an Antarctic continent, he urges 

 that had such connection taken place during the Tertiary period we 

 ought surely to have found South American types of Edentates and 

 Perissodactyles in Australia ; and it must be confessed that those 

 who urge the doctrine in question will have much difficulty in 

 attempting to disprove the contention. At the same time, the 

 evidence of the fossil Marsupials of Argentina shows that at some 

 time there must have been a connection between the Australian and 

 Neotropical faunas. 



Special attention is directed in the memoir to the extinct faunas 

 of Argentina and Patagonia, in the course of which it is shown that 

 if the earliest of these be correctly assigned to the Eocene period, its 

 mammals had attained a degree of specialisation far and away ahead 

 of their North American and Old World contemporaries. All the 



