FEBRUARY 5, 1914] 
placing it along with Salpa and Doliolum in the 
Thaliacea, as has recently been done by Neumann and 
by Parker and Haswell. 
Ir would be difficult to find a better example of the 
valuable work that can be accomplished by a local 
scientific society than is offered in the Transactions of 
the Norfolk and Norwich Naturalists’ Society for 
1912-13. The presidential address, by Mr. Robert 
Gurney, is concerned with ‘‘The Origin and Con- 
ditions of Existence of the Fauna of Fresh Water.” 
He is of opinion that the fauna of the relict lakes 
of the world show that the isolation of marine fauna 
does not lead to any great accession to the fresh-water 
fauna. ‘It seems that the successful adaptation of a 
species to fresh water depends essentially on a physio- 
logical variation of the organism, without which the 
most favourable external conditions are powerless to 
assist immigration.” Next comes a very careful, 
complete, and well-illustrated monograph, by Prof. 
_ Oliver and Dr. Salisbury, on the topography and 
vegetation of Blakeney Point, that hunting ground of 
naturalists, which has now been brought under the 
National Trust as a nature reserve. It is followed by 
Mr. A. Preston’s notes on the great flood of August, 
1912, which was of such disaster to Norwich. Then 
comes a very valuable instalment of Mr. C. Morley’s 
“Fauna and Flora of Norfolk.’ Other shorter 
papers, well worth study, include those on the grow- 
ing of wild rice in East Norfolk, on the migrations of 
birds from Lowestoft and district, and on the record 
results of the Yarmouth herring fishery of 1012. 
Altogether, these Transactions do honour to a great 
society of natural history, in a county favoured by 
nature and famous in science. Dr. Sydney Long, the 
hon. secretary of the society, is to be congratulated 
on the care with which he has edited this collection of 
monographs. 
7 
“Tue Geology and Mineralogy of Tin” are the 
subjects of a bibliography of 1701 entries, accompanied 
by an index of 167 pages, prepared for the Smith- 
sonian Institution by F. L. and Eva Hess (Miscell. 
Collections, vol. Iviii., No. 2). Since a brief account 
of the contents of almost all the papers is supplied, 
this publication will form a standard work of reference. 
It does not profess to be complete as regards works 
on the extraction.and treatment of the ores, and 
hence we miss a reference to the ingenious test for 
cassiterite with hydrochloric acid and zinc, put for- 
ward, we believe, in West Australia in 1908. 
Dr. Joun Batt, in Paper No. 29 of the Survey 
Department of Egypt (1913) describes the topography 
and geology of the phosphate deposits of Safaga. 
The district lies about 400 kilometres south-south- 
east of Suez, near the Red Sea. The phosphate de- 
posits occur on either side of the Wadi Safiga at 
distances of from twelve to twenty-two _ kilo- 
metres inland. The phosphatic series consists of 
laminated grey clays with beds of calcareous phos- 
phate and chert, lying between Upper Cretaceous 
limestones above and Nubian Sandstone below. There 
are three principal phosphate beds, all in the upper 
part of the series. These beds range from 1} to 2 
NO. 2310, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 
641 
metres in thickness, and carry from 20 to 75 per 
cent. of tricalcic phosphate. The bulk of the phos- 
phatic matter is in the form of loosely agglomerated 
phosphatic grit, which may have been derived from 
the breaking up of shells, the calcium carbonate of 
which has been partially converted to calcium phos- 
phate by the action of soluble phosphate from the 
decomposition of the soft portions of sharks the teeth 
of which occur very abundantly. The phosphate con- 
tent may have been raised subsequently by the leach- 
ing out of some of the calcium carbonate. The origin 
of the chert has not yet been ascertained. The 
deposits are being worked at the Um el Huetat mines 
by the Egyptian Phosphate Company. 
Tue seventeenth Rapport sur les variations 
périodiques des Glaciers (Zeitschrift fiir Gletscher- 
kunde, Band vii., Heft 1, p. 1) was published in Sep- 
tember, 1912, with some unavoidable omissions. The 
supplement now added, Band vii. (1913), pp. 191-202, 
gives the information which had not then been re- 
ceived. It includes the glaciers on the north side of 
the Mont Blanc massif, those of the Maurienne, the 
Tarentaise, and Dauphiné, the Caucasus, the Altai, 
and North America, chiefly Alaska. In the first re- 
gion two, Des Bossons and Du Tour, show a marked 
advance, another one is stationary, and the fourth 
observed is slightly retreating. Those in the other 
regions are either stationary or showing slight oscil- 
lations, or are still retreating, though not rapidly. 
The eighteenth Rapport, recently published (Band viii., 
p- 42), shows that, though the cold summer of 1912 
has produced some effect, this is local, and compara- 
tively small. Thus the information, as a whole, does 
not affect the conclusion to which that already received 
distinctly pointed, namely that the period of retreat, 
which has now lasted (at any rate in the Alps) for half 
a century, has not yielded generally, as might have 
been anticipated, to one of advance. The eighteenth 
Rapport includes the Pyrenees, where the glaciers 
mostly show signs of advancing, Norway, where the 
majority are receding, and North America, of which 
this is also true. Here the retreat is in some cases 
considerable, notably in that of the Grand Pacific 
Glacier, which has gone back 25 kilometres in thirty- 
three years. Besides these, the number contains some 
notes on Greenland glaciers, which, though neces- 
sarily incomplete, are interesting. They also show 
that the ice has receded in recent years. 
We have received a copy of the U.S. Daily 
Weather Map for January 1, with the announce- 
ment that from that date the U.S. Weather 
Bureau began the publication at Washington 
of a weather map of the northern hemisphere, which 
will be printed on the reverse side of the usual morn- 
ing weather chart. Although the number of reports 
is limited at present, and the observations are not all 
strictly simultaneous, the essential features of atmo- 
spheric circulation over that hemisphere are fairly well 
shown. Prof. Marvin points out that in the latter 
publication the rational units of the c.g.s. system 
are adopted; pressures are expressed in millibars 
| (1000 millibars=29-53 in.), and temperatures in abso- 
lute units (the temperature on the Centigrade scale 
