Reviews — Proceedings of Geologists Association. 39 



occupies thirty-four pages of three columns each, and both students 

 and investigators in the Paheontology of the Lower Vertebrates will 

 feel that at last they have some definite and satisfactory basis to 

 work upon. Dr. von Zittel is to be congratulated upon the com- 

 pletion of another part of his laborious undertaking, and the most 

 gratifying reward that the Professor can receive must be the very 

 evident improvement in the respective authors' knowledge of the 

 literature of the subject in recent contributions to the PaljBontology 

 of Fishes, Amphibians, and Eeptiles. A. S. W. 



III. — Dr. Otto Jaekel on the Systematic Position and Fossil 



Remains of Pristiopliorus. 

 " Ueber die ststematisohe Stellung und ueber fossile Eeste 



DKR Gattung Pristiophorus." By Otto Jaekel. [Zeitschr. 



deutsch. geol. Ges. 1890, pp. 86-120, pis. ii.-v.] 



THIS is a valuable contribution to our knowledge of an interesting 

 Selachian family, of which few traces have been met with 

 among fossils. Six-sevenths of the memoir relate to the skeleton 

 of the existing species, comprising observations made in the Berlin 

 and British Museums ; and the remaining pages are devoted to a 

 description of the fossil remains regarded by the author as pertaining 

 to the same type. Prof. Carl Hasse has already recorded vertebrae 

 of Pristiopliorus from the Molasse of Baltringen, Wiirtemberg ; and 

 Dr. Jaekel now describes rostral teeth from the same formation and 

 locality, considered to justify the establishment of a new species, 

 Pristiophorus suevicus. The fossils from the Amuri Beds of New 

 Zealand, determined by J. W. Davis to be caudal spines of a new 

 species of Trygon (T. ensifer), are now shown, from microscopical 

 characters, to be rostral teeth of another extinct form of Pristiophorus. 

 The remarkable Sclerorhynchus, from the Upper Cretaceous of Mount 

 Lebanon is also discussed and considered to be a subgenus of 

 Pristiophorus. As, however, a discovery in the British Museum 

 a year ago (Proc. Zool. Soc. 1889, p. 450) suggested, and probably 

 proved, that the trunk of the Lebanon genus had been erroneously 

 described under the name of Squatina crassidens, it may be well that 

 Dr. Jaekel should reconsider the subject. There is a fine example 

 of the so-called S. crassidens in the Noetling Collection at Berlin, 

 which will probably be available for study and comparison. 



A. S. W. 



IV. — Proceedings of the Geologists' Association, Vol. XL No. 8. 

 November, 1890. 



AMONG the many papers in this number, that of Mr. B. B. 

 Woodward, on the Pleistocene (non-marine) MoUusca of the 

 London Basin seems to be the most valuable. It is this kind of 

 contribution that we like to see, this collecting together, and adding 

 to, of all available information on one subject. Indeed in these days 

 of unlimited writing, the author who takes the trouble to sift the 

 wheat from the chaff deserves as much, or even more thanks, than 

 he who adds scrappy notes to the mass. Mr. Woodward has pre- 

 sented to us, in some fifty pages, the results of all researches in the 



