12 S Notices of Memoirs — Dredging in the Gulf of Suez. 



were in the field more than five months, in Kansas, Nebraska, 

 Colorado, and Utah. The Union Pacific Eailroad formed their base 

 of operations, from which they made excursions both to the north 

 and south, one or two hundred miles. In the midst of wild beasts 

 and still more dangerous savage Indians, their path was beset with 

 difficulties and fraught with adventure. The scientific results of the 

 expedition will be published as soon as possible. 



The fossils obtained in Nebraska, Utah, and Colorado were chiefly 

 from the "Loup Kiver" Pliocene and the "Mauvais Terres" or the 

 Miocene, both deposits formed beneath enormous fresh-water lakes, 

 whose banks were tenanted by many of the peculiar Pachyderms of 

 the Paris Basin. The number of American fossil horses — some 

 of them contemporary with the earliest human tribes, but now 

 entirely extinct — has been enlarged to eighteen. One of them is 

 allied to the Hipparion, and another is a pigmy only two feet high. 

 The well at "Antelope Station" (U.P.E.E.), an excavation ten feet 

 in diameter and only eight feet deep, has furnished specimens of 

 fifteen mammals ! Pour of these are horses, two rhinoceroses, an 

 animal allied to the boar, two camels, and three large carnivores. 

 The Miocene strata were found two hundred miles further south 

 than they had been noticed previously. Much additional inform- 

 ation was obtained about the Titanotherium Proutti ; tending to show 

 that it was only half as large as originally described. 



The most important expedition of the summer was along the 

 main tributaries of the Colorado Eiver in Utah, a region hitherto 

 unexplored by scientific men. It proved to be a Miocene country, 

 formerly one of those enormous fresh-water lakes, abounding in 

 crocodiles, serpents, turtles, and fishes. At one point of view eleven 

 fossil turtles could be seen at once without turning the head. 

 Ehinoceroses and various other mammals of the warmer regions 

 seem to have frequented the shores of this ancient lake. Numerous 

 specimens illustrating the anatomical structure of the Mosasauroid 

 reptiles were exhumed in Kansas ; after which the party disbanded 

 and returned home. This Eocky Mountain region is wonderfully 

 inviting with its stores of Pachyderms and fresh-water reptiles, and 

 no industrious collector can fail to be liberally rewarded by a visit. 

 Not a hundredth part of the region has yet been carefully explored. 



C. H. H. 



IV. — ^Eeport on the Testaceous Mollusc a obtained during a 

 Dredging Excursion in the Gulf of Suez, in thk Months 

 OF February and March, 1869. By Egbert M'Andrew. 

 [Annals and Magazine of Natural History, December, 1870.] 



THE dissimilarity between the fauna of the Eed Sea and that of 

 the Mediterranean has attracted much attention from naturalists ; 

 and this fact, combined with the more or less distinct character of 

 the deposits now forming over the bottoms of the two seas — that in 

 the Eed Sea being essentially calcareous, while at the mouth of the 

 Nile the deposit is chiefly sand — has bearings of much importance 

 to the geologist. 



