50 Notes and Comments. 
of the nest of the Reeve by T. H. Nelson is very poor ; and the 
‘ Index to Vol. I.’ which occupies less than ninety entries on one 
page, is not a worthy one. Though the magazine is ostensibly 
devoted to Northumberland and Durham, it includes Cumber- 
land and Westmorland ‘and parts of all other counties bor- 
dering on Northumberland and Durham,’ in this way closely 
resembling the area’ covered by The Lancashire and Cheshire 
Naturalist, which, in turn, seems to have chosen almost the 
area covered by The Naturalist. Anyway, there is nothing 
in the index to Vol. I. of The Vasculum to show which, if 
any, counties are referred to in the notes, nor are any author s 
names, nor localities given. 
NOMENCLATURE. 
In a recent number of Nature, Dr. Chalmers Mitchell draws 
attention to the fact that Mr. G. S. Miller has recently des- 
cribed plaster casts of the famous remains of early man from 
Piltdown, and he considers that the lower jaw has no con- 
nection with the remains of the skull. Without having seen 
the actual specimen he describes it as Pan vetus, so that 
according to Mr. Miller, the object described by Dr. Smith 
Woodward, and in his charge at the British Museum, should 
be cited as the type specimen of Pan vetus G. S. Miller, this 
being an extinct Chimpanzee ! 
FOSSIL ZONES AND GEOLOGICAL TIME. 
At a recent meeting of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 
Dr. J. E. Marr read some notes on “ Fossil Zones and Geological 
Time.’ An attempt was made to estimate the time required 
for the accumulation of the fossilferous rocks by taking the 
case of chalk, comparing its rate of accumulation with that of the 
modern globigerinous ooze, and then calculating the number 
of fossil-zones in the chalk and in the whole of the fossiliferous 
strata. The result obtained suggests a minimum period of not 
fewer than 21,000,000 years for the formation of the fossiliferous 
strata. The controlling factors are too uncertain to permit 
much stress to be laid on this estimate, which is probably much 
too low, but according to it the evolution of organisms from 
the beginning of Cambrian times onwards need not have 
occupied a period of time greater than that which on various 
grounds is granted to geologists by followers of other sciences. 
The method may be applied with nearer approximation to 
accuracy, in estimating the relative importance of different 
groups of strata; thus the number of zones in Palzozoic and 
Mesozoic rocks respectively indicates that the period during 
which the former were being laid down was not necessarily 
much longer than that required for the accumulation of the 
latter. ares 
_ . Naturalist, 
