THE 



OEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE 



VOLUME LIX. 



No. v.— MAY, 1922. 



EDITORIAL NOTES. 



MR. Alfred Bell has presented to the Sedgwick Museum, 

 Cambridge, a manuscript catalogue compiled by himself of the 

 Newer Tertiary Flowering Plants of Great Britain ; in each case 

 localities and geological horizons are recorded. The catalogue will 

 be available for reference by those desiring to consult it, but since 

 only one copy exists this cannot be allowed to leave the Museum. 



Mr. Bell hopes to compile a similar catalogue of the flowerless plants. 

 ***** 



At the risk of becoming tedious and to avoid misunderstanding, 



we find it necessary to refer once again to the subject of illustrations 



in the Geological Magazine. We wish to emphasize the fact that 



under present economic conditions plates must be considered a 



luxury, and with much regret we are compelled to insist on a strict 



rule that all such must be paid for by the author, the approximate 



cost of a plate being about £4. With regard to text-figures the 



situation is that the cost of a line-block is about the same as that of 



an equivalent amount of type ; therefore, we wish to urge on 



contributors the desirability of illustrating their papers by means of 



Ime drawings instead of photographs. For such we shall henceforth 



make no extra charge, and in our opinion as a rule drawings are much 



more effective than photographs for nearly all geological purposes : 



they enable the artist to emphasize the essential points and to omit 



extraneous details which only serve to distract attention from the 



leal object of the illustration. 



***** 



One of the most notable signs of the times with regard to the recent 

 progress of geology in this country is the extent to which discussions 

 ■of theoretical questions of petrogenesis are now being transferred to 

 meetings of technical societies and to the periodicals specially 

 devoted to economic geology. We wish to refer specially to the 

 animated debates that have recently enlivened the proceedings of the 

 Institution of Mining and Metallurgy and to some excellent papers 

 on petrological subjects in the pages of the Mining Magazine. 

 Although some of the ideas put forward m these quarters are doubt- 

 less heretical, they do at any rate show originality and thought. It 

 is by way of heresy that progress is made. It is greatly to be feared, 

 how^ever, that many geologists never see these publications, and for 

 that reason attention is called to them here. A theory is not 

 necessarily negligible because it is based on economic data, and the 

 future of petrology is likely to be underground. 



VOL. LIX.— NO. V. 13 



