1893. 



NOTES AND COMMENTS. 483 



The two addresses agree tliat the great mountain ranges of the world, 

 whether above water or below them, had their foundations laid in 

 the pre-geologic era of the solidifying globe, as the later crustal 

 movements seem to have followed the original lines of weakness ; 

 and this not only applies to the great meridional chains, but to the 

 intersecting east and west lines, such as the Mediterranean-Caribbean 

 depression and the corresponding alpine line of elevation, which 

 dates at least from Palaeozoic times. Similarly they both conclude 

 that the oceanic islets of the Pacific indicate an area of subsidence, 

 and the submerged ridge of the land area there once cut up the Pacific 

 Ocean, as the probable connection of the Atlas with the Venezuelan 

 Cordillera once broke the continuity of the Atlantic. 



It, therefore, seems probable that the new stratigraphers will 

 allow the palaeontologists the principal transoceanic bridges that 

 they demand. Professor James Geikie suggests that the cosmo- 

 politan distribution of Palaeozoic species was really due to the 

 absence of any oceanic abysses to bar the spread of littoral species. 

 We thought it was now pretty generally understood that the 

 supposed identity of, for example, the Carboniferous faunas of the 

 world, was simply due to the diagrammatic figures of the European 

 species having led to essential distinctions being ignored and species 

 wrongly identified ; closer study has shown that such world-wide 

 faunas are myths, and that we have the same cases of some Palaeozoic 

 faunas common to the two sides of the Atlantic, with succeeding 

 ones that are as sharply differentiated as any of later date. The 

 study of extinct faunas is, however, as yet in its infancy, and it seems 

 not unlikely that one of the results of the new geology may be the 

 ultimate separation of the zoologists from the palaeontologists, the 

 former studying species and the latter faunas. 



The problems suggested by the work of the Vienna school of 

 geology are of intense interest but great difficulty, and will require 

 for their solution the help of all the three branches of stratigraphy, 

 petrology, and palaeontology. It forms a curious comment on the 

 oft-made statement that the future of Science is with the specialist, 

 that the man who has done so much to set the pace for the new 

 geology has written on nearly every branch of geological science, and 

 is equally at home in the details of the stratigraphy of the Alps, 

 the Central Plains, or the Tertiary basins. He has dealt with 

 nearly every group of animals that has left traces for palaeontologists 

 to decipher, from sponges to mammals, and from fish to foraminifera, 

 and has advanced as greatly the classification of Brachiopods as 

 of earthquakes. He, moreover, as the author of Die Zukunft des 

 Goldes, has taken rank as one of the ablest champions of bimetallism, 

 and, until he incurred the wrath of anti-Semitic prejudice by 

 a noble appeal for justice to the Jews, he was one of the very foremost 

 of the leaders of the Liberal party in the Austrian Reichstag. 



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