April 15, 1904.] 



SCIENCE. 



613 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 C'onlnbutions to the Tertiary Fauna of 

 Florida with especial reference to the 

 Silex Beds of Tampa and the Pliocene of 

 the Oaloosahatchie River. By William 

 Healey Dall, A.m. Transactions of the 

 Wagner Free Institute of Science of Phila- 

 delphia, Vol. III., pp. 1654, 60 plates. 

 With the appearance of part VI. the Wag- 

 ner Institute has brought to a close the work 

 upon the Tertiary geology and paleontology 

 of Florida begun in 1886, and recorded in 

 Vol. I., and the series of volumes composing 

 ' Vol. III.' of the Transactions. Vol. I. (1887) 

 by Professor Angelo Heilprin, announcing the 

 discovery of the Oaloosahatchie Pliocene beds 

 by Professor Heilprin and Mr. Joseph Willeox, 

 with a first report on its fossils and those of 

 the silex beds at Tampa, has already been 

 noticed in these columns. 



In 1890 the work was resumed by Professor 

 Dall with the cooperation of the U. S. Geolog- 

 ical Survey, originally with the intention of 

 exploiting the Tampa silex beds (then called 

 Old Miocene), the Chesapeake Miocene and 

 the Oaloosahatchie Pliocene. As the work 

 progressed, these bounds were found too nar- 

 row for the full development of the subject, 

 and practically all marine Tertiary faunas of 

 America, from Panama to Oanada, have sup- 

 plied materials for the work. Even Cretaceous 

 horizons have been laid under contribution. 

 This spreading of the subject over faunas not 

 indicated in the title of the work has provoked 

 some adverse criticism not wholly undeserved, 

 for it is undeniably a hardship to have new 

 Cretaceous species described in a work on 

 Neocene paleontology. But to the evolution- 

 ist, the student of molluscan genealogies, this 

 wide range of comparison in a vertical direc- 

 tion, so to speak, is of inestimable value, and 

 in the hands of Dall has brought out the rela- 

 tions of successive faunas in a way never at- 

 tained by the old method of dealing with each 

 formation separately. 



Although the work deals only secondarily 

 with stratigraphy, yet the collateral researches 

 and field explorations undertaken in connec- 

 tion with the paleontological work give it high 

 value from the purely geological standpoint. 



It marks an epoch in the study of eastern and 

 middle American Tertiary deposits. The 

 recognition and exposition of the marine Oli- 

 goeene of Florida and the Antilles is one of 

 the notable advances in geological knowledge. 

 In the earlier part of the work it was recog- 

 nized that the so-called Miocene of Florida 

 comprised two very dissimilar faunas, and to 

 the earlier the term Old Miocene was applied 

 in this work. Further study and material 

 showed that this ' Old Miocene ' had nothing 

 to do with the Miocene of the United States 

 in its most typical development, as in Virginia 

 and Maryland, but represented a group of 

 horizons strictly analogous to those which had 

 received from European geologists the name 

 of Oligocene. These horizons contained a 

 very rich warm-water fauna which was soon 

 foimd to be more or less distinctly represented 

 in the Tertiaries of middle America and the 

 West Indian Islands." This led to the exam- 

 ination of the fauna of the beds at Bowden, 

 Jamaica, and in Santo Domingo, etc., that the 

 correlation of Antillean and continental beds 

 might be discovered. " It was found that the 

 connection between the Atlantic and Pacific 

 faunas ceased at about the climax of the 

 Oligocene, and that the relations between the 

 faunas were so intimate that the Pacific coast 

 forms could not safely be entirely neglected." 

 These conditions gradually led to an extension 

 of the work, in the course of which ' several 

 distinct Oligocene faunas have been worked 

 out with fulness and their relations estab- 

 lished; a wide extension has been given to the 

 Pliocene deposits, long confused with those of 

 the Upper Miocene; the geological relation- 

 ships of the beds between the Vicksburgian 

 and the Pleistocene have been established in 

 their main lines more clearly than has hither- 

 to been the case.' 



Regarding Antillean geology. Dr. Dall con- 

 siders that the views of Professor E. T. Hill 

 are supported by the evidence of Mr. T. W. 

 Vaughan's field observations, and the informa- 

 tion from other sources, as opposed to the 

 hjrpotheses of Dr. J. W. Spencer, based upon 

 his studies of submarine topography and of 

 non-fossiliferous terranes supposed by Spencer 

 to be marine Pliocene and Pleistocene. This 



