1897] SOME NEW BOOKS 133 
four other classes of the Mollusca might have had more than eight. 
We should not, even in a geological auide, expect to find the Brachio- 
poda and Bryozoa associated with the Arthropoda and Vermes as a 
‘Subkingdom Annulosa.’ To balance the fifteen pages on sponges, 
or the seventeen figures of trilobites, we should have asked for more 
than twenty-four lines on those particularly interesting forms, the 
Cystidea and Blastoidea, especially as our national museum possesses 
not only a fine collection of these rarities, but an officer well qualified 
to deal with them. And, in the account of the sponges, one might 
have suggested that a simple division into Silicispongiae and Calei- 
spongiae » scarcely represented modern ideas of classification. Finally, 
we should have demanded very much better paper and printing ; and 
even now we hardly consider that the get up of the work befits a 
great public department—it is certainly inferior to that of previous 
Guides. 
But whether regarded as a text-book or as a guide there is no 
doubt that in many “respects the work is a great advance on anything 
hitherto attempted at the price. We hope that the public will 
recognise this, and that the speedy exhaustion of the edition may 
pave the way for another with all the merits and without the few 
defects of the present one. 
** PALAEONTOGRAPHICA ” AMONG CRIMINAL LITERATURE 
RELIcs OF PRIMEVAL Lire. By Sir J. W. Dawson, K.C.M.G., F.R.S.  8vo, pp. ix. 
336, with 67 figs. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1897. 
Sir Witt1AM Dawson’s book on “The Dawn of Life” having been 
for some time out of print, he has prepared the present volume to 
take its place. A good deal of the old matter and many of the illus- 
trations therefore naturally reappear. The familiar story of the dis- 
covery of Eozoon, and of the spread of the belief in its organic 
structure, is again told, and Sir William Dawson refers to the prin- 
cipal criticisms on the other side. On pp. 273-274 Eozoon is made to 
tell the story of its own existence in an imaginary autobiography. 
It candidly admits its low intelligence and that it did not know 
whence it came; but “at length a change came. Certain creatures 
with hard snouts and jaws began to prey on me.” Apparently the 
most objectionable of the hard-snouted generation was Mobius, whose 
work, in spite of its “large and costly figures” (p. 161), is described 
as valueless, owing to “ that narrow specialism and captious spirit for 
which German naturalists are too deservedly celebrated.” Mobius, 
according to Sir William Dawson, “did his best;” but so bad is his 
best that the publication of his memoir “was a crime which science 
should not readily pardon or forget on the part of the editors of the 
German periodical ” in which it ‘appeared. 
Sir William Dawson does not give his opponents a very cordial 
invitation to continue the discussion, for he remarks in reference to 
the honest way in which Eozoon did his duty, that those who “ dispute 
as to his origin and fate” are “much less perfectly fulfilling the ends 
of their own existence.” So we will try to fulfil the ends of our own 
existence by discussing subjects in which an adverse verdict is not a 
“ crime.” 
