78 Eevieivs — B. B. Woodtvard's Life of the Mollusca. 



7. In the next section Professor Waltiier touches very lightly on 

 erosion forms in Sinai and the Arabian Desert, again referring those 

 produced to the influence of water-action and deflation. This section 

 deals with an area so complex and so varied that it might itself 

 without great difficulty be raised to the rank of a volume ; but to 

 understand the origin of the stupendous precipices of the lied Sea 

 Hills and the Red Sea depression, the varied features due to dyke- 

 ridges, and the wearing of soft veins of basic rock, or the spreading 

 of gravel plain and ancient coral-reef, requires a clear conception of 

 the earth-movements which have made this remarkable region what 

 it is. Only as the result of the giant earth-creep by which the 

 underlying granitic masses have risen high above the depression of 

 the Gulf of Suez, and the breaking up of a mighty anticline, have we 

 the basis on which rain-storm and deflation, chemical change and 

 sand-scouring are able to work. Marine erosion and tectonic changes 

 of the first magnitude have produced the surface features which have 

 acquired the [)resent desert characteristics by processes so ably 

 described in the volume under consideration. 



I?,E1"VIE^WS. 



I. — The Life of the Mollusca. By B. B. Woodward, P.L.S., of 

 the British Museum (IS^atural History), Past President of the 

 Malacological Society of London. 8vo ; pp. xii and 158, with 

 32 plates and a map. London : Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1914. 

 Price 6s. 



WHEN I was but a youthful aspirant in science I received from 

 Dr. S. P. Woodward a present, in three parts, of his Manual 

 of the Mollusca, a Treatise on Recent and Fossil Shells^ (1851-6). 

 When bound it was only 7i X 4^ inches in size, with 530 pages, 

 25 plates, and 272 text-figures. The mass of matter squeezed into 

 it was enormous — much more so than the publisher bargained for I 

 I thought it the most wonderful book I possessed, next to Darwin's 

 Voyage of the '■'■ Beagle ^\ 



That this little work should have held its place as a scientific text- 

 book for sixty years seems almost past belief, and speaks volumes for 

 the great mass of valuable biological facts contained in its small and 

 closely printed pages. jSTumerous other works on malacologv have 

 since appeared, of greater or less importance, by Lovell Reeve, 

 Forbes & Hanley, Henry and Arthur Adams, J. Gwyn Jeffreys, 

 G. B. Sowerby, and lastly by Dr. Paul Pelseneer (author of one of 

 Sir Ray Lankester's Zoological Treatises, part v, 1906), ictc, proving 

 that a large section of the public still pursues the studj' of the 

 Mollusca beyond those perennial lovers of oysters who date back 

 even to our prehistoric ancestors. 



^ It formed one of " Weale's Elementary Series" (afterwards transferred 

 to Virtue & Co.), and of whicli between 1851 and 1880 upwards of 11,000 

 copies were sold. In 1880 a fourth edition, price 7s. &d. (edited by Ealph 

 Tate), was published by Crosby Lockwood & Co. (its last owners), in which 

 several fossil genera of Mollusca were added in an appendix and the Tunicata 

 removed, but the Brachiopoda retained ! 



