368 Notices of Memoirs — The Fossil Man of Mentone. 



few years, which may perhaps have been peculiarly unfavourable. 

 On the contrary, the extensive, rounded, polished, and grooved 

 border of land, which almost everywhere separates the inland ice 

 from the extreme coast, shows plainly that the inland ice has in 

 many places during the last geological period retired several miles. 

 That this border-land has been uncovered later even than that at 

 Spitzbergen is evidenced, by this fact, among others, viz. that not one 

 of the numberless small sea-basins in North Greenland, in spite of the 

 suitableness of the locality for moss-vegetation, has yet become 

 filled with turf, even to the depth of a few feet, which indicates 

 that the slip of ice-free land is but a child of yesterday. It is true 

 that "turf" is the Greenlander's principal winter fuel, but what he 

 means by that name is, in almost all instances, merely an earth con- 

 sisting of rotten moss, grass-roots, and guano and refuse, which to 

 the depth of a few inches is soon formed on the skerries and islands 

 in the sea, and serves the sea-fowls as places of incubation. The 

 greatest part of the Greenlahder's turf -beds are situated on gulls' 

 hillocks ("maagetuer "), and have, therefore, geologically speaking, 

 nothing in common with what we mean by turf layers. It was 

 accordingly impossible for me to collect, as I had desired, by an 

 examination of the older turf-beds, materials for determining the 

 latest Post-tertiary changes of climate that have taken place in 

 Greenland. But instead, we, find here many other deposits, which 

 serve at least to give an indication of the changes that the animal 

 world has undergone during the Glacial period. 

 {To he continued in our next.) 



n^OTiciES OIF DynzEDvcoiiiS. 



The Fossil Man of Mentone.^ 

 Abstracted from the Comptes Eendus, No. 26, p. 1597, June 24, 1872. 



A SECOND communication on this subject has been presented by 

 M. E. Riviere to the Academy of Sciences, containing an 

 account of the measurements of different parts of the skeleton, and 

 of the assoicated fossil fauna found in the Baousse-rousse cavern, 

 and of which a notice appeared in this Magazine for June. The 

 skeleton is of large size and nearly complete ; some of the bones of 

 the feet are wanting, as also the lower extremity of the left tibia, 

 and the posterior extremity of the calcaneum of the same side, 

 which were broken during the excavation. From the fractured state 

 of the skull it was scarcely possible to take the exact dimensions ; it 

 was elongate, very dolicocephalous, less large than the skull No. 1 

 (crane de vieillard), found at Cro-Magnon in 1868, with which it 

 offers the greatest analogy, and specially with the orbit, which 

 presents, as in that skull, a very extended transverse diameter, and 

 a very reduced vertical one ; the superior orbital margin is thin and 

 sharp, less so, however, than that of the skull No. 1 of Cro- 

 Magnon, and the inferior margin is also less thick than in the latter. 

 1 See the Geological Magazine for June last, p. 272. With an mgrming. 



