210 Chronicles of Science. [ April, 
perforated by them. M. Dupont speculates on their carelessness, 
their industry, their superstition, and their respect for the dead, all 
of which he ingeniously infers from circumstances connected with 
either the position or the material of the objects obtained from the 
varlous caves. 
In the recently published volume of the ‘Transactions of the 
Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire for 1866-67, Mr. 
Henry Eeroyd Smyth gives his annual paper on the “ Archeology 
of the Mersey District,” this one being for 1866. It is perhaps 
rather more interesting than usual on account of its contaming a 
record of the discovery of an early stone Celt im Parliament Fields, 
Liverpool; and an “omnium gatherum” thrown up on the sea- 
beach near Wirral, including objects of Primeval, Romano-British, 
Saxon, Early English, and Later English dates. ‘The author pre- 
faces his list of these remains by supporting in the main Dr. Hume’s 
views on the latest submergence of the country near Liverpool 
against the opposition of Mr. Joseph Boult, although at the same 
time he differs from the former gentleman in some matters of detail. 
Professor Schaaffhausen, of Bonn, delivered an address last Sep- 
tember before the forty-first ‘ Versammlung deutscher Naturfor- 
scher und Aerzte’ of Frankfort-on-the-Main, entitled “ Ueber die 
anthropologischen Fragen der Gegenwart,” which is published in 
their last ‘Tageblatt. This review of Anthropology, which is 
really an eloquent advocacy of it, is chiefly remarkable from being - 
based on a view of the subject which is mainly conspicuous in 
Germany by its absence. It is directly opposed to the blasphemies 
of Buchner, and we strongly commend it to the notice of the An- 
thropological Society of London. 
The new scientific magazine, entitled ‘The American Naturalist,’ 
—to which we have occasion to refer at length in our Zoological 
Chronicle—for January, contains an interesting “ Account of some 
Kjoekken-moeddings, or shell-heaps, in Mame and Massachusetts,” 
by the eminent naturalist, Dr. Jeffries Wyman. In it the author 
describes several such accumulations which he visited last year ; 
but they have yielded nothing which indicates so high an antiquity 
as the similar accumulations of the Old World, although certain 
circumstances indicate the lapse of a considerable period of time, 
e.g., the friable condition of the shells in the lower layers, the 
occurrence of a layer of earth between the two principal strata of 
which they consist, and that of the remains of animals not now 
known in the district. We may cite, in illustration of the last- 
named condition, the elk, which at present is not known to exist 
east of the Alleghany Mountains; the wild turkey, now virtually 
extinct in New England; and the great auk, which has receded 
almost, if not quite, to the arctic regions. All of these animals, 
however, have disappeared during the historic period of the con- 
