Re a cane 
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15 
evidence collected by them may come in useful for totally different lines 
of study. Who would, at first, think of appealing to the botanist as to the 
probability of a change in the position of the earth's axis? but not long 
ago it was publicly announced, on the authority of one of our most distin- 
guished botanists, that the plants whose remains haye been found in the 
Arctic regions (Spitzbergen and elsewhere), cannot have lived there unless 
the axis of the earth had been then in a different position, as those ever- 
greens could not have lived through the four months’ darkness of the Arctic 
night. On talking this over with the great Swiss botanist, De Canpo.ty, 
and Professor Hxzrr, they at once gave an exampie which altogether over- 
threw the objection. They pointed out that the Alpine roses, a small 
species of rhododendron, were periodically buried under snow to such a 
depth as to be in total darkness for at least four months every year. 
The zoologist, also, who carries his enquiry back to the period just before 
our own, must be very careful in reasoning from analogy—not to push 
inferences too hard or too hastily. What a fair inference it seemed at first 
that gravel, which contains the remains of the elephant and rhinoceros, 
must have been deposited under conditions similar to those under which 
those animals live at the present time. What a surprise must the Siberian 
mammoth, with its long hair and wool, and the woolly rhinoceros, have been 
to the speculators on the former climates of the Northern Hemisphere. 
Let us‘ not be too hasty to infer that the astarte borealis necessarily 
implies a coldish water, or the group of shells now found on the coast of 
North Wales an equable climate, until we can offer some good reason why 
the corbicula fluminalis and wnio littoralis, which lived in Britain with the 
mammoth, should have been driven away, one as far as the Nile, and the 
other as far as the Loire and other rivers of the North of France. For the 
paleontologist there is plenty of work to be done in the mountain lime- 
stone, for instance, which is within excursion-distance of Chester. Take 
any two species of producta oy spirifera or other common fossil—collect 
a thousand or so of each; then, for winter-work, clean them out, and see 
whether you cannot work out all the intermediate stages between any two 
closely-allied forms. We have had species determined frequently, if not 
generally, by specialists who have not worked much in the rock itself, but 
have had the most typical specimens of any form that has struck the 
collector senttothem. In such cases the intermediate forms were neglected. 
I hope that, at Cambridge, by the excellent work of our Curator, 
Mr. Kerrine, and his Son, we may soon give an example of how this may 
be done. Having collected thousands of specimens of terebratula, rhyn- 
chonella, &e., from the Neocomian, last vacation, they are now engaged in 
arranging them, to show hew a considerable number of species can be run 
into one by the discovery ot the intermediate forms. But it does seem to - 
me that it is to natural philosophers we must look for the next great advance 
in geological investigation. We must ask them to define more clearly the 
limits within which we may speculate on the possible thickness of moving 
ice. In a recent presidential address to the Geological Section of the British 
Association—( British Association, Bradford, Transactions Section C.) it 
was stated that we could have no more than 1,000 feet vertical, Subse- 
