102 A Retrospect of Palaeontology for Forty Years. 



Piloceras from the Tremadoc Slates, and on the perforated apex and 

 siphuncle of Actinoceras from the Black River Formation (Silurian), 

 Canada. Professor G. Lindstrom (1888) described Barrande's genus 

 Ascoceras from the Upper Silurian of Gotland, and announced the 

 discovery of an earlier or Nautilus stage in the growth of this 

 Cephalopod shell, which was evidently decollated in the later period 

 of its life, leaving the Ascoceras form behind. This was more fully 

 illustrated by Dr. A. H. Foord (in 1889). The earlier part of the 

 shell seems to have been composed of a series of air-chambers, 

 which were periodically thrown off by natural truncation. It is 

 interesting to notice that some modern land-shells (e.g. BuUmus 

 decollatus) throw off the apex of their spiral shells, living after- 

 wards in a truncated shell, the top of which is closed by 

 a diaphragm. In 1891 Dr. A. H. Foord discussed Orthoceratites 

 vaginatus, Schl., from the Silurian of Sweden ; and in 1903 

 G. C. Crick described some new forms of Orthoceras from the 

 Silurian of the Province of Shantung, North China. In 1897 

 Dr. Gerhard Holm figured Baltoceras, a new genus of Ortho- 

 ceratitidse from the grey Lituites Limestone of the I. of Gland, a form 

 of Orthoceras with a marginal or sub-marginal siphon. 



Pisces. — In our retrospect of Vertebrate Palaeontology we find 

 in the Geological Magazine a vast store of most important 

 contributions to all the great sections, that of fossil fishes being par- 

 ticularly rich and varied. Foremost among writers in Ichthyology 

 stands the name of the veteran zoologist, Dr. Albert Gtlnther, who 

 from 1856 to 1895 devoted himself specially to the study of Reptiles 

 and Fishes in the British Museum, and was Keeper of Zoology for 

 20 years (1875-95). He wrote a description in vol. i, 1864, of 

 a new fossil fish from the Lower Chalk of Folkestone, which he 

 named Flinthophorus robustus ; and in 1876 described 10 species 

 of fishes from the Tertiary Marl-slates and Carbonaceous shales of 

 the Padang Highlands, Central Sumatra, collected by R. D. M. 

 Verbeek, illustrated by five large folding plates. Our old chief. 

 Professor Owen, who for 27 years (1856-83) held the post of 

 Superintendent of the Natural History Departments in the British 

 Museum, contributed numerous papers to the Magazine, six being 

 devoted to fossil Ichthyology. In 1865 he described a jaw of 

 Stereodiis melitensis from the Miocene of Malta ; he figured and 

 named a sauroid fish from the Kimmeridge Clay, Oxfordshire, 

 Ditaxiodus impar (1866) ; TMattodiis suchoides from the same 

 horizon at Downham, Norfolk. In 1867 he made a large number of 

 genera and species of fishes from the coal-shales of Northumberland ; 

 many of these minute fish-remains were later on (p. 379) suggested 

 to be dermal ossicles of large fishes, and others to be the teeth of 

 fishes already described by Agassiz and others. In 1869 Owen 

 noticed a fine jaw of Strophodiis from the Oolite of Caen, Normandy, 

 a fossil shark closely related to the living Port Jackson shark, 

 Cestracion Philippi, of which a woodcut was given on p. 236. 

 He also described and figured a spine of Lepracanthus Colei, from 

 the Coal-measures, Ruabon, North Wales (1869). Professor Ray 



