REVIEWS NEW SPECIES OF LOWER SILURIAN FOSSILS. 71 



apposite morality, and winds up with a touching peroration on the 

 power of religion, and the labours of its missionaries, in contend- 

 ing with the elements of Indian dissolution. No wonder, moreover, 

 that the shrewdest of London's bibliopoles should have been deceived 

 into sharing such profitable romancing, when it is considered 

 how this same learned Abbe Domenech has since culminated in 

 his literary triumphs. Bent on the fulfilment of his promises of 

 further revelations, he has secured the Emperor Napoleon III. as 

 his latest publisher, and has issued, at Imperial cost, a magnificent 

 folio of hieroglyphic and demotic chroniclings of the New World ; as 

 gratifying, we doubt not, to the members of the Academic des 

 inscriptions et belles-lettres as the ethnology we have described must 

 have proved to be to his fellow-members of the Parisian Ethnographic 

 Society : for on inspection, this gorgeous imperial folio of Indian 

 hieroglyphics turns out to be a series of facsimiles of a German 

 child's drawing-book, be-sketched and be-scribbled in the usual style 

 of nursery art, which some rogue has palmed on the credulous Abbe 

 as a genuine Red Indian M.S., more valuable than all the contents of 

 Lord Kiugsborough's costly folios of Mexican picture-writing. 



'New Species of Lower Silurian Fossils. By E. Billings, F.G.S. 



(Montreal : November 21, 1861). 



In this pamphlet, recently issued by the able palaeontologist of the 

 Geological Survey of Canada, the author describes and figures a very 

 considerable number of new fossils from the Potsdam Group and some 

 of the succeeding formations of the Lower Silurian strata. Until a 

 comparatively recent period, the lowest subdivision of our fossiliferous 

 rocks bore the name of the Potsdam Sandstone, and was looked upon a3 

 consisting wholly of arenaceous deposits, nearly destitute of organic 

 remains — a few fucoids, including the doubtful scolithus linearis, some 

 lingulse, and the celebrated crustacean(?) tracks, making up the entire 

 list of these. The subdivision in question is now known, however, to 

 include also various beds of limestone with interstratified and underlying 

 shales and dark slates, classed collectively under the name of the Pots- 

 dam Group, and referred to the horizon of Barrande's Primordial Zone. 

 "Whilst the sandstones, as in most strata, are but sparingly fossiliferous, 

 ■ the limestones, with their interstratified argillaceous beds, exhibit an un- 

 -fixpected abundance of organic forms. Amongst those now described 



