478 REVIEWS 



In his rejection of hypothetical eversions of ocean basins, the author 

 does not hesitate to include Gondwana-Land, in some sense the parent — 

 the mythical Atlantis aside— of the whole brood of lost continents. In 

 this the author is likely to be sustained by stratigraphic and glacial evi- 

 dence now already grown to a considerable mass which testifies, as well 

 as bordering evidence well can, to the absence of any such elevated land 

 connection between Australia, India, and South Africa across the 

 Indian Ocean as is so commonly postulated to account for biologic dis- 

 tribution and the remarkable glaciation of those regions in Permo- 

 Carboniferous times. In the opinion of the reviewer the stratigraphic 

 and glacial evidences are not only quite against such intervening conti- 

 nent, but the hypothesis increases rather than alleviates the difficulties 

 of explaining Permo-Carboniferous glaciation in those strange latitudes, 

 and surely the difficulties are formidable enough without such hypotheti- 

 cal embarrassment. 



The author does not push his negative attitude toward diastrophic 

 extravagances farther back than Gondwana-Land because his study of 

 vertebrate evolution does not seem to require it, but he might well have 

 carried it back to the strange apparition of fishes and fishlike forms. 

 Because coarse Devonian sediments with ichthyic faunas and terrestrial 

 floras are found to encircle, in an imperfect way, the North Atlantic 

 basin, an Atlantis is postulated in disregard of the strictly logical inter- 

 pretation of both the physical and biological evidence which implies a 

 disruption of the basin border, with a probable accentuation of the basin 

 itself, instead of its eversion with the extremely improbable reversal of 

 diastrophic action involved. 



It is of course not improbable that some geomorphic changes of con- 

 siderable importance have affected the ocean basins and the continental 

 embossments in the course of geologic history, and possibly some of these 

 may have been vital factors in the distribution of life, but the conserva- 

 tive example of the author in endeavoring to exhaust the probable 

 influences of known fluctuations of milder type, attested by their own 

 credentials, before resorting to coUossal changes devoid of an appropriate 

 record of their own, is wholesome and highly commendable. The paper 

 should be read for its method as well as its material. 



T. C. C. 



The Noatak-Koluk Region, Alaska. By Philip S. Smith. Bull. 

 U.S. Geol. Surv. No. 536, 1913. Pp. 157. 

 This report deals with the geology along the Noatak and Kobuk rivers 

 which drain an area included approximately between 154° and 156° west longi- 



