Reviews — Memoir of John Michell. 517 



thirty-seven species to those already known. Of these at least 

 fourteen species are new. 



Arber concludes from his examination of the fossil floras that 

 there is no evidence, at the time of writing, of any terrestrial 

 vegetation in New Zealand older than the Triasso-Rhsetic, and he 

 considers that, on the known evidence, New Zealand did not form 

 any part of the Permo-Carboniferous continent of Gondwanaland, 

 although in Rhajtic, and probably also in Jurassic times, New 

 Zealand and Tasmania were united with Australia as one large 

 connected land area. Professor Seward is inclined to recognize 

 a close alliance between the Mesozoic genus Lingui folium, which 

 occurs in New Zealand, and the genus Glossopteris, which 

 characterized tlie Gondwanaland flora, but Arber, in the present 

 paper, gives detailed reasons for maintaining the distinctness of these 

 two genera. 



The flora of Waikato Heads, Auckland, is of particular interest as 

 being perhaps one of the old'est, in a geological sense, of the known 

 Neophytic floras. Professor Laurent, of Marseille, contributes 

 a description of two Angiosperms obtained from these beds, one of 

 which is fragmentary, while the other consists of leaves which he 

 refers to a new species of the genus Artocarpidiu77i. 



A. A. 



II. — Memoir of John Michell. By Sir Aechibald Geikie, O.M., 

 K.C.B., F.R.S. pp. 107. Cambridge University Press, 1918. 



GEOLOGISTS owe a considerable debt to Sir Archibald Geikie 

 for his contributions to the history of their science. That debt 

 is further increased by the issue of this memoir, dealing, as it does, 

 with the life and work of a man who, though little known at the 

 present day, held a position of no small note among his 

 contemporaries. 



John Michell, to use an often-repeated phrase, was a man of parts ; 

 he was one of those persons of wide interests and accomplishments 

 who adorned the front rank of scientific men in the eighteenth and 

 early nineteenth centuries, but who have, unhappily, been swept 

 away by the advance of modern progress and its accompanying 

 necessity for specialization. He was, of course, a classic and 

 mathematician, and in addition to his geological work he carried out 

 experiments in physics and devoted a considerable amount of time to 

 astronomical observations, which he performed with a reflecting 

 telescope made by his own hands. 



He was elected to a Fellowship of Queen's College, Cambridge, at 

 the age of 25, in the year 1749, and held a number of ofiices 

 in the University till 1762, when he was elected to the Woodwardian 

 Professorship of Geology. This ofiice he only held for about two 

 years, when he was obliged to resign from it on the occasion of his 

 marriage. From this time onwards he held in succession the benefices 

 of Compton, Havant, and Thornhill, at the last of which he died in 

 the year 1793. 



Being a man of a somewhat modest and retiring disposition he has 



