Reviews — Reptiles and Fishes in British Museum. 137 



Flora. The task has been difficult. The imperfect nature of the 

 specimens has rendered accurate diagnosis and determination 

 impossible in many cases, but the author has faced the difficulties 

 in a spirit of scientific caution, and there has been no attempt to 

 overestimate the significance of unimportant characters. The volume 

 before us will be thoroughly appreciated by residents in South 

 Africa, Australia, and other countries where the Glossopteris Flora 

 occurs, and we may confidently look forward to the discovery of 

 better specimens which will afford the means of placing on a firmer 

 basis of botanical knowledge the vegetation of Gondwana Land. 



II. — A Guide to the Fossil Keptiles, Amphibians, and Fishes 

 IN THE Department of Geology and Paleontology, British 

 Museum (Natural History), Cromwell Eoad, London, S.W. 

 Eighth edition (entirely re- written), 1905. 8vo ; pp. 110, with 

 8 plates and 116 figures in the text. (Price 6d.) 



(PLATE XII.) 



THE progress of biological science has been so great within the 

 last fifty years that the barrier which once divided the two 

 branches of study into fossil and recent animals has been swept 

 away, and we find the student of zoology quite eager to learn all 

 he can about those ancient forms of life, now long since extinct, 

 and to trace out their relationship with their living descendants. 



It thus happens that on entering the Geological Department we 

 see the modern Indian Elephant installed close to the American 

 Mastodon and the European Mammoth, while near by are the more 

 ancient ancestral forms of Pal(Bomastodon, Moerithermm, etc., from 

 Egypt, together with the Dinotlieriiim and the existing African 

 Elephant to ' round up ' the story of the Proboscidea. 



On the modern Zoological side advances have also been made 

 towards an entente cordiale between the recent and fossil Eeptilia, 

 and we find the centre of the gallery occupied by the newly 

 acquired skeleton of Diplodocus Carnegiei, a huge Dinosaurian land 

 reptile, 80 feet in length, from the Upper Jurassic strata of Wyoming 

 Territory, U.S.A., ^ surrounded by a court of recent Crocodiles, 

 Tortoises, Snakes, and Lizards, whilst pictures and casts of various 

 fossil forms are shown in the cases with their recent congeners. 



These arrangements, of course, partake of compromise, but it would 

 be next to impossible frequently to change the order of such 

 vast collections as are preserved in the National Museum ; the 

 business is costly in the extreme, and the amount of labour involved 

 simply stupendous. Professor Sir Wm. Flower, the late Director, 

 commenced a rearrangement of a part of the collections, assisted by 

 Mr. Lydekker, one of the most active and energetic of zoologists; 

 but Flower died in 1899, and although Lydekker has continued his 

 labours in association with Professor Eay Lankester, the present 

 Director, the vast work of reorganizing the Zoological Galleries is 

 still in progress. 



^ See Geol. Mag., December, 1905, p. 576, PL XXV. 



