42 Recieics — Brief Notices. 



Notre Dame de la Salette, Lievre Pdver, Quebec, and John A. Dresser 

 on a recent discovery of gold near Lake Megantic, Quebec. Another 

 report, by 0. E. Leroy, which includes the coast from north of 

 Texada Island to the United States boundary, is highly important, but 

 the Government printer has been rather unkind to the author in that 

 he has made up his report in pages as follows : 22, 23, blank, covering 

 letter, 18, 19, 8, 9, 30, 31, 12, 13, etc., and thus makes it a little 

 difficult to follow. "We gather, however, that Devono-Carboniferous, 

 Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Eocene beds have been identified, 

 and that the beds are a good deal disturbed by volcanic rocks. 



4. EossiL Peakls. — Although John Woodward, in 1723, referred 

 to the fact that fossil shells, as well as recent, had "pearls and the 

 like still actually growing upon them ", and Goldfuss had figured, 

 in 1836, an example of Inoceramus showing the existence of pearls, 

 it was not till 1851 that these bodies were definitely figured and 

 described. In that year John Morris wrote a paper in the Annals 

 and Magazine of Natural History upon material in the Wetherell 

 Collection, and this material is still preserved in the British Museum. 

 Mr. R. Bullen Newton has now collected together the previous 

 information, added a sketch of the occurrence and formation of pearls 

 in general, a note on fossil pearls, and then described and illustrated 

 many examples which have come under his own observation. In this 

 paper (Proc. Malac. Soc, 1908, vol. viii, pp. 128-39) Mr. Newton 

 distinguishes between true pearls and 'blisters', which latter are 

 caused by the intrusion of foreign bodies between the mantle and the 

 shell, etc. True pearls are known by their radiating and concentric 

 structures as shown in section. Fossil pearls are described from 

 VolseUa, Inoceramus, Perna, and Qryplma, some of which are from 

 half to three-quarters of an inch across. These large specimens 

 present all the characters seen in sections of recent pearls as described 

 by Dr. Herdman in his "Report to the Government of Ceylon on 

 the Pearl Oyster Eisheries ", and other works referred to. The 

 Inocerami appear to have been great producers of pearls, some 

 internal casts showing regular rows of pits between the ribs which 

 can only be impressions of attached pearls. Most of the examples 

 described by Mr. Newton are in the British Museum, but the finest of 

 all, and one which shows the characteristic structure in a remarkable 

 manner, is in the possession of Mr. B. B. Woodward. With two 

 exceptions, all the shells showing pearl structures described in this 

 paper are Cretaceous, and they include specimens from England, 

 Japan,^ Pondoland, Germany, and the United States. 



_ 5. Silurian Bivalvks of ViCTOuiA.^Sixty-two species of Silurian 

 bivalves belonging to twenty- nine genera, including all forms known 

 up to date, have been monographed by Mr. Erederick Chapman in the 

 Memoirs of the National Museum, Melbourne, 1908, No. 2. These 

 include the collections of Selwyn, McCoy, Cresswell, Spvy, Jutson, 

 and Kitson. Eleven of these are considered identical with European 

 forms. The time has not yet arrived to zone up the series of beds 

 from their contained fossils, as much more detailed collecting is 

 necessary. This can only be done as more sections are made or more 

 quarries opened in undeveloped areas. The fossils are all carefully 



