170 NATURAL SCIENCE. Marcu, 
be enough for him to observe that every year for the last—we don’t know 
how many, there have been popular lectures on Zoology given at the 
Gardens. For the last few years they have been delivered by Mr. 
Beddard ; and it is clear that a course of lectures on Zoology would 
not come by any means amiss to this paragraphist. 
WE are always glad to note the gradual percolation of science 
through the lower strata of our population, and we have derived 
much instruction from a recently-issued pamphlet entitled ‘‘ Leaves 
from the Book of Nature, or Stepping Stones in Creation,” by L. Piers. 
The author seems to be a great admirer of the Geological Depart- 
ment of the Natural History Museum, and his acquaintance with the 
collection, if not extensive, is at least peculiar. He traces the history 
of our globe from the ‘“‘ Archaen” rocks ‘‘ composed of schistose or 
granitic character,” through the Cambrian period when the sea was 
at go°, the Silurian and Devonian, with their Graptolites, Ammonites, 
Crinoids, and Nummulites, the Carboniferous, ‘‘ Treassic”’ and 
Jurassic, then ‘‘the Cretaceous system composed of white chalk,” 
down to the Tertiary periods and the great ice age. ‘‘ Wonderful 
and marvellous truly are the mysteries of Nature”! thus we read of 
that ‘‘ curious crustacean called trilobite; they were in three great 
families, olenellus, pavadoxides, and olenus,” then the Crinoids, whose 
‘‘ province was to check the too great increase of certain other 
creatures, while in their turn they were devoured by the larger fishes” 
[poor fishes!]. But, oh! the ‘strange and long reptile, named 
Deinosaura,” ‘‘the Plestosaurus, the earliest crocodile,” the ‘‘ extra- 
ordinary Petrodactylus and Tyinoceros.”’ 
Two notes on page 16 inform us, first, that ‘‘the vertebrate 
kingdom are in five great divisions: fish, reptiles, birds, mammalia, 
man ;” secondly, that ‘‘ The visitors will find at the entrance to the 
Geological Department some excellent illustrated catalogues.” Are 
these catalogues really so bad? or did Mr. Piers write his book before 
he read them ? 
Ir is well-known that a long-haired variety of the tiger ranges at 
the present day as far north as the region of the Amur, on the frontier 
of China and Siberia. The animal is thus capable of living in a cold 
climate, but the astonishing discovery has just been made of evidence 
of its former range to a northern latitude even within the Arctic Circle. 
Among the fossil bones collected in the New Siberian Islands and on 
the adjoining mainland by a Russian expedition despatched from 
St. Petersburg in 1885, there are five characteristic ‘limb-bones of 
the tiger. They are described by Dr. J. D. Tscherski in his report 
on the collection (Mém. Acad. Imp. Sci. St. Pétersbourg, vol. xl., no. 1, 
with 6 plates), and occurred in the same deposits as bones of the musk 
ox, mammoth, &c. 
