T. Davidson—Bibliography of the Brachiopoda. 565 
IV.—I Terrent Sasprost e ta Fintosera. Boll. del R. Comit. 
Geol. d'Italia. July, August, 1880. 
HE Italian Minister of Agriculture communicated to the engineer 
of the mines at Caltanisetta in Sicily the observations of the 
French Society of Agriculture, relating to the soils in which the 
Phylloxera was most abundant. It appears that they noticed that 
the vines in argillaceous and compact soils fell a victim to the 
Phylloxera, whilst in sandy soils they were unaffected. The most 
favourable being soils with a large proportion of siliceous, and not 
above 12 per cent. of calcareous sand. It was found that, where the 
roots of vines passed through two strata, one sandy and the other 
argillaceous, the part of the root which traversed the argillaceous 
soil was covered with Phylloxera, whilst the rest passing through 
the sand was healthy, and not at all attacked by the insects. 
In reply to this, Sig. P. Posi sends a very interesting report on 
the geology and culture of the vine in Sicily. Most are grown on 
volcanic soils, but all volcanic rocks are not suited for vine culture, 
as when it is vitreous nothing will grow, whereas felspathic lavas, 
rich in potash and easily subject to atmospheric decomposition, are 
eminently fitted for growing vines; but the most productive of all 
are the extensive deposits of fine ashes. Sig. Posi says that the rain 
of ashes during the last eruption added so much to the fertility of the 
soil that it much more than compensated for any damage done by 
the eruption to the forests and other cultivated land. He points out 
that the physical nature of these ashes approaches so much to that 
of loose sand that it may very possibly resist the invasion of the 
phylloxera, and thinks it worthy of further experiment, seeing that 
while it contains the necessary elements for the growth of the vine, 
there is no argillaceous material to favour the growth of the phyl- 
loxera. After the volcanic earths, most of the vine culture is in the 
Pliocene and Miocene sands, with but little in the marly districts. 
— As\W.: W. 
REVIEWS... 
he BE, 
J.—ANNALES DE LA Soorété MatacoLoaique DE Bexeiquz. Tome 
XII. 2%™° Ser. tome ii. (Brussels, 1877.) 
HE Annals of the Belgian Malacological Society for the year 
1877, just issued, contains, in addition to geological and malo- 
cological papers and the bulletins of the Society, an exhaustive list of 
eight Svo. pages of titles of memoirs relating to living and fossil 
Brachiopoda. This useful and very complete bibliography was com- 
piled with considerable labour and research by Mr. Thomas Davidson, 
F.R.S., the chief historian of the group, who, it is evident therefrom, 
has himself contributed since 1847 over fifty memoirs to the literature 
of the class. The list contains more than 1,200 alphabetical entries, 
from the earliest publications of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries of Colonna (in 1606), Pallas, Rumphius, and Cuvier, up to 
the more recent works of Owen, Hancock, Huxley, King, Morse, 
Kovalevsky, etc., until the month of April, 1876. It was intended 
as an appendix to the French translation of the author’s memoir, 
