Dr. Anton Fritsch — On Prolimulus Woodivardi. 57 



It is clear that Godwin-Austen's conclusions are quite compatible 

 with the existence of the river- valleys, which Professor Hull thinks 

 that he has traced, and he appears to consider that the landscape of the 

 Channel, if it were laid bare, would be very diversified. He also appears 

 to regard this landscape as the outcome of long-continued agencies, 

 both marine and terrestrial, while, if I understand him rightly, he 

 attributes the original formation of the Channel valley to plication 

 dating from Eocene times. As regards the remark that of the true 

 nature of the sudden line of depi-ession from the continental plateau 

 to the ocean floor we can only form conjectures, will it not help us 

 in our conjectures to notice the very remarkable parallelism between 

 the outlines of the western coast of the Old World and the eastern 

 of tlie New ? Surely there must be a cause for this peculiar feature 

 in some way connected with the formation of the basin of the 

 Atlantic. It seems as if a single original continent had been split 

 into two masses, which had subsequently separated. This idea 

 appears to have occurred to M. A. Snider, but I have been unable 

 to get a sight of his work.^ Two of his diagrams are copied into 

 " Pepper's Playbook of Metals." 



If there is any foundation for such a supposition, the edges of 

 the continental plateaux on the opposite sides of the Atlantic ought 

 to be the two sides of the rent, and ought to fit one another still 

 more accurately than the coastal profiles do, because in the lapse of 

 ages these would have become much modified. Would it not 

 be worth while for those who have been studying the two plateaux 

 to notice whether this is the case ? 



I have offered a speculation on the cause of this great rent in 

 Nature'^ Sindi subsequently in ray "Physics of the Earth's Crust," ^ 

 and it is not needful to recapitulate it here. 



III. — Preliminary Note on Prolimulus Woodivardi, Fritsch, 



FROM THE Permian Gaskohle at Nyran, Bohemia. 



By Dr. Ant. Fritsch, 



Director of the Royal Bohemian Museum in Prague. 



SOME years ago I received a fossil preserved in pyrites from the 

 Gaskohle at Nyfan. No details could be seen under the micro- 

 scope, and I was not sure if it were a Limulus or a seed. At an 

 exhibition by Architects held last year at Prague I saw a specimen 

 of a similar fossil with two of its appendages preserved, and I was 

 fortunate enough to acquire the same for our Museum. I then re- 

 examined all ray material previously collected, and found appendages 

 in other specimens also. Several plates with drawings of these 

 objects will appear in the second part of the fourth volume of my 

 work, "Fauna der Gaskohle," but as this work will require more 

 than a year before it can be published, I hasten to give a preliminary 

 sketch of this Permian Xiphosure, which I dedicate to my friend 

 Dr. Henry Woodward, one of the chief authorities on fossil Crustacea 

 in England. 



1 "La Creation et ses Mysteres devoiles." - Yol. xxv (1882), p. 243. 



^ Second edition (1S89), chap. xxv. 



