100 
Locke, Hume, Sir J. Herschel, Mill, and Whewell—the 
only authors quoted on the subject of induction, will be 
specially interesting to English readers. 
3. The philosophical basis of the conceptions at the 
root of the natural sciences, with a full treatment of Ideal- 
ism and Materialism, and a discussion of the differences 
between matter passive and without force, and matter 
active, bound up, that is to say, with capacities of change 
of state. 
Professor Karsten’s contributions involve an enormous 
amount of statistical and bibliographical labour. Fifty 
pages are occupied with a complete catalogue of the 
literature of general physics. All the encyclopedias, all 
the scientific periodicals and collections, all the books on 
the history of science, and all the handbooks and general 
treatises of all modern nations, are gathered together in 
one most useful and naturally bewildering list. Germany, 
Switzerland, England, the United States, France, 
Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, 
Russia, Italy, Spainand Portugal, are the countries which 
contribute. The order in which we have given them ex- 
hibits the civilised world from the German professor’s point 
of view. 
A second treatise by the same author deals with all of 
what are called the universal properties of matter, and 
discusses in full the problems of chemical affinity and the 
newest theories of atoms. Little is really carried lower 
than the year 1860, but references are given to all books of 
importance published as late as 1867. 
His third treatise gives us the methods of measurement, 
with full descriptions of the instruments and copious 
tables of comparison between the units of different 
countries. Professor G. Weyer finally supplies a sepa- 
rate work on the determinations of space and time. All 
questions of latitude and longitude, of apparent and real 
magnitude, are fully discussed, and the astronomical data 
which affect our estimates of time are exhibited in full. 
We have preferred to give our readers a simple state- 
ment of what is contained in the closely-printed volume 
of goo royal octavo pages before us. Detailed criticism 
of five separate treatises, in the space at our disposal, is 
a mereimpossibility. It is sufficient to say here that every 
subject discussed is worked out in all the painstaking 
and exhaustive detail to which the separate volumes 
of Karsten’s Encyclopadie previously published, have 
accustomed us. Such works are of the greatest possible 
service to literature. They are not produced in England. 
Our scientific men are too busy conquering new worlds, 
and lecturing on the exciting incidents of every fresh con- 
quest. There is not aman too many thus engaged, but 
we confess that we sometimes turn with desire to our two 
great medizeval universities, where the liberality of our fore- 
fathers has established hundreds of fellowships, expressly 
that men might have leisure to devote themselves to life- 
long studies. How is it that Oxford and Cambridge leave 
us to sigh for impossible translations of laborious books 
like this, which has been sent us principally by the Uni- 
versity of Kiel? 
W. J. 
De labus des boissons alcooligues. Par L. F. E. Bergeret. 
(Paris; Bailliére et fils.) 
THE author, who is the senior physician of the Hospital 
D’Arbois (Jura), has for the last thirty years devoted 
special attention to the effects produced by the excessive 
use of alcoholic liquors. Though denying that alcohol 
is in any form a necessary of life, he fully admits that the 
moderate use of alcoholic liquors has its advantages, and 
the work has been written chiefly with the object of 
affording a popular illustration of their physiological 
action, and of exciting a wholesome fear of their abuse. 
The volume contains a large amount of very interesting 
information, and the results of much personal observation 
relating to the consequences of habitual intoxication. 
NATURE 
[Fune 9, 1870 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR 
(The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions expressed 
by his Correspondents. No notice is taken of anonymous 
communications. | 
The Cretaceous Epoch 
THE President of the Linnean Society having been good 
enough to credit me, in the interesting address which has just 
appeared in NATURE, with the doctrine that the formation of 
chalk has been going on continuously over some part of the 
North Atlantic sea-bed from the Cretaceous epoch to the present 
time, I feel it due to my friend and colleague, Prof. Wyville 
Thomson, to disclaim most explicitly the merit of having ori- 
ginated this doctrine, which entirely belongs to him. I regret 
that the form in which it was promulgated in my report of the 
Lightning expedition should have led to this misapprehen- 
sion ; but that form was adopted at my friend’s express desire ; 
and I have on every occasion (as in my recent lecture at the 
Royal Institution) spoken of the idea as exclusively 47s. Whilst 
myself fully accepting and advocating it, I am the more anxious 
that there should be no mistake in this matter, as it seems to me 
that the idea is one which must exert so important an influence 
on the future course of geological inquiry that its introduction will 
be one of the landmarks in the history of the science. 
The similarity of the globigerina-mud, at present in process of 
formation, to the mesozoic chalk, had been recognised by various 
microscopists who had studied: both—as Ehrenberg, Bailey, 
Williamson, Huxley, Wallich, and Sorby. But no one, so far as 
I am aware, had ventured to advocate the wnbroken continuity of 
the chalk formation throughout the Tertiary and Quaternary 
periods, until it was pointed out by Prof. Wyville Thomson that 
there is no adequate evidence of its ever having ceased, though 
its locality has changed. 
This doctrine has received most striking confirmation from the 
discovery of the persistence of numerous cretaceous types, more 
or less modified, not merely in our own explorations, but in 
those carried on by the United States Coast Survey in the Gulf 
of Mexico, That we could not expect to find the cretaceous 
fauna as a whole in our modern chalk is evident from the consi- 
derations so admirably set forth in Mr. Bentham’s address ; and 
if the cretaceous epoch is to be limited by the duration of that 
particular ezsemdble, it may, of course, be affirmed to have closed 
long since. But if there has been a continuous production of 
globigerina-mud from the time when the cretaceous area of 
Europe was a deep-sea-bed, the elevation of that sea-bed, so as 
to bring a large part of it above the surface, being probably 
coincident with the depression of what is now the North Atlantic 
Basin, to which the globigerinze then migrated, and if there be 
found in the newly-formed chalk so large a number of repre~ 
sentatives of the types most characteristic of the old, as indicates 
the continued prevalence of the same general, physical, and 
biological conditions, there is, I submit, a fair justification of the 
assertion (the pregnant words of which are Professor Wyville 
Thomson’s) that ‘‘we may be said to be still living in the creta- 
ceous epoch.” And, asI ventured to put forth in the lecture 
referred to, the ozs probandi now seems to me to rest on those 
who assert that this continuity has been interrupted, and that the 
chalk formation now in progress is anything else than a conti- 
nuation of that of which Dover Cliff is composed. 
Whilst ‘fon my legs,” I would venture to call the attention of 
geologists to the question which has been much considered by 
Professor Wyville Thomson and myself, whether we are not 
justified, by the probabilities of the case, in carrying dackwards 
the continuity of the accumulation of Foraminiferal mud on the 
deep-sea bed, into geological epochs far more remote ; since 
there must have been deep seas in all periods, and the changes 
which modified the climate and depth of the sea-bottom must 
have been for the most part sufficiently gradual to admit of the 
migration of animals to whose continued existence in the same 
locality those conditions were no longer favourable. It is a most 
interesting confirmation of the view we are disposed to entertain 
on this point, that, as I have recently learned from Sir William 
Logan, coccoliths and coccospheres have been discovered in some 
of the most ancient Palzozoic limestones of North America. 
WILLIAM B. CARPENTER 
[See also Prof. Giimbel’s letter to Prof. Huxley on this sub- 
ject in NATURE, vol, I. p. 657,—Zd.] 
