Febeuabt 26, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



351 



Decade IV., No. 84. A letter from the Rev. 

 Wm. Hirst dated Fort St. George, E. Indies, 

 Tebruary 25, 1761, offers a careful drawing of 

 a leaf -insect with the remark: 



Nature seems to have provided for its security 

 by giving it so strong a resemblance to Blades of 

 Grass among whicli it is frequently found. 



Decade V., No. 60. In a letter dated St. 

 Petersburg, 21 Oct./l Nov., 1768, in which 

 Leonard Euler alludes to his blindness, occur 

 "these words : 



As the British Parliament were pleased to re- 

 "ward so generously the slight researches which I 

 had made on the Lunar Theory. 



Decade V., No. 80. A letter, dated Eio de 

 Janeiro, November 30, 1768, from Captain 

 James Cook to Dr. Morton, secretary of the 

 Eoyal Society, wherein Cook writes: 



The account we gave of our Selves of being 

 tound to the Southward to observe the Transit 

 of Venus (a Phenomena they had not the Idea of) 

 appeared so strange to these narrow-minded Por- 

 tuguese that they thought it only an invented 

 Story to cover some other design we must be upon. 



Decade VI., No. 40. On March 24, 1774, a 

 paper was read by Edward Spry, a well-known 

 surgeon of the day, explaining his antiseptic 

 treatment of amputations by the use of a spe- 

 ■cial dressing, " preventing putrescence." 



Decade VI., No. 119. Professor John Win- 

 throp, of Cambridge, Mass., described, in a 

 letter dated November 16, 1774, a pictorial 

 hieroglyph inscribed on a rock twenty miles 

 south of Boston, on the Taunton River. 



Decade VIII., No. 1. Writing to Sir Joseph 

 Banks, Sir William Herschel names a new 

 etar, Georgium Sidus. 



Decade IX., No. 27. A paper of 19 pages 

 communicated by Pierre Laporterie under 

 date of August 14, 1786, and entitled " Saphir 

 ■crystal, susceptible de I'etoile a six raions"; 

 not printed. 



Decade X., No. 65. Paper by Sir WiUiam 

 Herschel on the " Quintuple Belt of Saturn " ; 

 read December 19, 1793; not printed. 



Decade X., No. 70. Letter of Alessandro 

 Volta regarding Galvani's discoveries; read in 

 January, 1794; not printed. 



Decade XL, No. 98. An account of the 

 Andaman Islands and their inhabitants, by 



Captain Archibald Blair. 82 pages and map; 

 read April 4, 1799. 



Decade XII., No. 28. Description of what 

 he calls a pulmonary calculus, by Philip 

 Crampton. This concretion was seven inches 

 in diameter and weighed 845 grains. 



In addition to the names mentioned above, 

 the following are especially noteworthy: John 

 Abernethy, Abbe Jean Jacques Barthelemy, 

 G. B. Beccaria, Comte de BufFon, Charles 

 Burney Mus. Doc, Hon. Henry Cavendish, 

 Due de Chaulnes, Richard Chenevix, Erasmus 

 Darwin, Sir Humphry Davy, Sir William 

 Hamilton, Rev. John Lightfoot, Jean Hya- 

 cinthe de Megalhaens, P. L. M. de Maupertius, 

 Rev. Joseph Priestly. The index contains 

 more than fifteen hundred names, and enables 

 the student to refer without delay to each 

 paper or letter in the collection. 



George F. Kunz 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



A REVISED CLASSIFICATION OF THE NORTH 



AMERICAN LOWER PALEOZOIC' 



Classifications of stratigraphic subdivisiona 

 are bound to change with the expansion of 

 our knowledge of detail, so that the most re- 

 cently accepted must still be regarded as a 

 tentative one, to be replaced by a better one 

 when needed, and the knowledge of facts war- 

 rants it. The generally accepted classifica- 

 tion of the Lower Paleozoic of North America, 

 proposed by Clarke and Schuchert in 1899, is 

 now in part out of harmony with known facts, 

 while recent interpretation of previously 

 known facts still further suggests the de- 

 sirability of modification. For the Gambric 

 system Clarke and Schuchert retained essen- 

 tially the classification of Walcott, which, so 

 far as it is applicable to the facts, is a per- 

 fectly satisfactory one. The Lower Cambric 

 or Georgian, however, is typically developed 

 only in the Appalachian and western provinces 

 together with the corresponding regions of 

 northeastern and southern Asia. The At- 

 lantic province both of America and Europe 



* Abstract of a paper read before the joint meet- 

 ing of the New York Academy of Sciences and 

 eastern geologists, April 6, 1908. 



