566 REVIEWS 



It is shocking to learn that all the known phosphate deposits in the 

 world will last at best only 250 years at the present rate of consumption; 

 that America now furnishes two-thirds of the world's supply and sells 

 half of it to foreign lands; while it would require our entire production 

 of phosphates upon our own soil to give back to the soil what our corn 

 crop alone takes from it. 



The author is to be congratulated on producing a strong book in a 

 very vital field. Its influence should be constructive in a high degree. 



J. Paul Goode 



Epitome of the Geology of New South Wales. By E. F. Pittman. 



Circular No. 9. Sydney: Mining and Geological Museum, 



1909. Pp. 9, with geologic map. 

 This little pamphlet giving in a very brief, condensed form the principal 

 features of the geology of this large Australian province has just come to 

 the reviewer's attention. Those who frequently have occasion to familiar- 

 ize themselves with the salient points in the geology of various portions of 

 other continents often have longed for a series of just such outlines as this. 

 To pick the desired information from separate volumes of a long array of 

 standard geologic reports is a tedious and time-consuming task. A good 

 map and the essential facts of a far-away country brought together and made 

 available for ready use is a boon to every geologist who may have occasion 

 to refer to that region. Now that geological studies are world-wide it 

 is to be hoped that other countries and provinces will follow the example 



of New South Wales. 



R. T. C. 



Life and Letters of Josiah Dwight Whitney. By Edwin Tenney 



Brewster. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1909. Pp. 411, 



18 illustrations. 



In this biography the curtain is drawn aside and the reader is introduced 



intimately to one of the most conspicuous of the pioneers of American 



geology. When Whitney commenced his field work as an assistant on the 



first geological survey of New Hampshire in 1839, almost the whole of the 



United States was geologically an unknown land. The story of Whitney's 



life as it is unfolded in this book carries with it much of the history of several 



of the early surveys in which he took a leading part. These are the survey 



of the Lake Superior region (1847-50) which turned him from chemistry, 



toward which he had been preparing himself, to geology, and the Iowa 



State Survey, to which he was appointed in 1855 and which brought him 



