Geology and Natural History. 337 



which Europe, on account of the east and west trend of its moun- 

 tain ranges was cut off from the reception of the polar types in 

 their return from the more southern regions into which they had 

 been crowded by the ice sheet. This renders these forms specially 

 important to the student of American pre-glacial floras, and many 

 of them exhibit close relationships to those of our western de- 

 posits, l. f. w. 



3. Calcareous Algce. — Fossile Kalkalgen axis den Familien 

 der Codiaceen und der Corallineen • von Herrn Rothpletz in 

 Miinchen. Zeitschr. d. Deutsch. geol. Ges., Bd. xliii, 1891, S. 

 295-322, pi. xv-xvii. — Dr. Rothpletz has here monographed, 

 chiefly from the standpoint of their internal structure, the two 

 families of fossil Algae named in the title so far as his material 

 would permit, confirming the views of Meunier-Chalmas and 

 others, that many of the objects heretofore classed with the For- 

 aminifera and other animal groups are really plants. The forms 

 treated are referred to the three genera Sphserocodium, Girvan- 

 ella, and Lithothamnium, of the last of which he describes four- 

 teen species, and of the other two one each. They range from 

 the Rhetic to the Pliocene, but the Girvanella problematica 

 comes from the Ordovician of Ayrshire and was treated by Nichol- 

 son, Etheridge and Wethered as of doubtful affinities, l. f. w. 



4. On the Fructification of Bennettites Gibsonianus, Carr. ; 

 by H. Graf zu Solms-Lattbach. Annals of Botany, vol. v, No- 

 vember, 1891, pp. 419-454, pi. xxv, xxvi. — A notice of this me- 

 moir as it appeared in the Botanische Zeitung in 1890 will be 

 found in this Journal for April, 1891 (vol. xli, p. 331). As it 

 is based entirely on English material the editors of the Annals 

 have regarded it as worthy of reproduction in English for the 

 benefit of its readers for whom it might be otherwise inaccessible. 

 The translation was intrusted to Mr. H. E. Garnsey of Magdalen 

 College, Oxford, who has recently translated the Count's JEinlei- 

 tung in die Phytopalaontologie. As was pointed out in a recent 

 review of his translation of the latter work (Science, vol. xviii, 

 Dec. 25, 1881, p. 361), this memoir contains important modifica- 

 tions of the views of the author therein expressed which should 

 have been introduced into the English edition. l. f. w. 



5. ie Nelumbium .Provinciate des Lignites Gretac'es de Faveau 

 en Provence; par le Marquis G. de Saporta. Memoires de la 

 Soc. Geol. de France, tome i, Fasc. 3, Mem. No. 6, Paris, 1890, 

 pp. 9, pi. xii-xiv. — These deposits have hitherto furnished very 

 little paleontological evidence of their age which has been in con- 

 siderable doubt. M. de Lapparent placed them in the Danian or 

 extreme upper Cretaceous above the Maestricht beds, while the 

 present author regards them as occupying the level of the Gosau 

 chalk equivalent to the Campanian of the French geologists. 

 The remarkable aquatic plant here described cannot be said to 

 throw much light on this question although it bears the marks of 

 a greater antiquity than any other of its kind thus far found in 

 the fossil state. But besides the Nelumbium, the Marquis Saporta 



