Revieivs — A. S. Woodward's Catalogue of Fossil Fishes. 123 



la the address b_v Mr. Anderson, President of Section Gr at the 

 British Association Meeting held last year at Newcastle, as to the 

 permanent supply of petroleum, he refers to the theory of Professor 

 Mendelief that hydrocarbons in large quantities are forming now 

 by the decomposition of metallic carbides through the instru- 

 mentality of the elements of water, deep in the bowels of the earth. 



IS IB V I E AV S. 



I. — Catalogue of the Fossil Fishes in the British Museum 

 (Natural History). By Arthur Smith Woodward, F.Gt.S., 

 F.Z.S. Part II. (1891.) 



ONLY two years have passed since the publication of the first 

 part of Mr. A. Smith Woodward's Catalogue of the Fossil 

 Fishes in the British Museum, and now, in an almost incredibly 

 short space of time, we have the second presented to us, a goodly 

 volume of 567 pages and illustrated by sixteen plates. The scientifiG 

 public, as well as the author, is to be congratulated on the progress 

 of this work, which is calculated not only to be of the gi'eatest value 

 to all curators and keepers of museums in arranging and determining 

 their collections, but to specialists themselves in prosecuting further 

 researches in the same subjects. Mr. Woodward has exhaustively 

 ransacked, an immense amount of literature, which his visits to other 

 museums, both British and. foreign, have enabled him more thorouglily 

 to appraise, so that as a book of reference the work is simply 

 indispensable to those engaged in the study of fossil ichthyology. 

 But more than this, the author has succeeded in boldly systematizing 

 in a more satisfactor}^ manner than has hitherto been attempted the 

 more advanced notions of classification, which have been floating 

 about in the minds and writings of those engaged in this and cognate 

 studies ; and lie has done it in such a way as to impress his own 

 individuality on the work. 



As regards classification, Mr. Woodward has, as he acknowledges, 

 derived much of his inspiration from Prof. E. D. Cope ; but his 

 greater opportunities for making himself acquainted with fossil forms 

 has enabled him advantageously to modify the arrangements sug- 

 gested by the "somewhat fluctuating" classifications of the American 

 sj'stematist, and some of the ordinal and subordinal terms which he 

 has adopted fi'om that source appear with their scope materially 

 changed. We are not surprised to find our old familiar " Ganoidei " 

 broken up, and the name finally discarded ; for this we have long 

 been prepared, and especially since the evidence of the evolutional 

 continuit}'^ of the typical Ganoids with the Teleostei showed that the 

 " Pala^ichthyes " of Giinther could not be maintained. Like Cope, 

 Mr. Woodward adopts as subclasses of Pisces the Elasmohranchii, 

 BolocepJiaJi, Dipnoi, and Teleostomi, to which he adds the Ostracodenni 

 (Cope), including the Cephalaspideans and Asterolepids, the former 

 considered by Cope to be Agnatha and therefore not fishes, while the 

 latter were once placed by the same author among the Ascidians, 

 though lately he has pronounced them to be possibly Ostracoderms. 



