Reviews — Professor E. Ray Lankester^ s Extinct Animals. 513 



II. — Extinct Animals. By E. Rat Lankester, M.A., LL.D., 

 F.R.S., Director of the Natural History Department, British 

 Museum. 8vo ; pp. xxiv and 332, with 218 illustrations. 

 (London : Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd. Price 7s. 6d net.) 



IT is a fortunate circumstance that the lectures delivered at the 

 Royal Institution orally, with lantern illustrations, last Christmas, 

 by Professor Ray Lankester, should, before another Christmas has 

 yet arrived, be printed as a book, not only admirably suited to boys 

 and girls, but for men and women also, with an abundant amount of 

 illustrations in the text calculated to make it most attractive to the 

 general reailer. 



Everyone will recollect the droll creatures so cleverly invented 

 by Tenniel for " Alice in Wonderland," and one cannot help feeling 

 that with many of Professor Lankester's monsters the children of 

 to-day will be equally delighted. What, for instance, could be 

 more quaint than the probable appearance of Iguanodon (p. 198), 

 or the dear little Arsinoitherium (p. 153). Nor is the long-jawed 

 Mastodon (Tetrabelodon) without a certain comic Christmas aspect 

 (p. 119). The artist has, by accident, put the prehensile tip of the 

 animal's proboscis beJow, instead of above, the nasal aperture, but this 

 is the only serious slip we have noticed, and for a picture-book of 

 extinct animals it is the best of its kind we have ever seen. The 

 book, however, is much more than a book of pictures; it is full of 

 information presented in an agreeable form for the non-scientific 

 public, and is very much up to date. The only new animal which 

 came over from America too late to find a place in its pages is 

 Mr. Carnegie's Diplodociis, which one must go to the British Museum 

 to see. 



Fig. 1. — Head of an Ichthyosaurus, from the Liassic rocks of Lyme Eegis, in the 

 Natural History Museum. The head is 3 feet 6 inches long. 



Professor Lankester, among many other attractions, introduces 

 his audience to a fascinating skull of an extinct monster which he 

 remembered to have seen in his own youthful days in the Natural 

 History Museum, "then in a remote part of London called Blooms- 

 bury, but now in Cromwell Road, Kensington. It is the head of 

 an Iclithyosaurus dug out of the rock in the South of England, at 

 Lyme Regis, many years ago. The eye is peculiarly well-preserved. 



DECADE V. — VOL. II. — NO. XI. 33 



