Geology and Mineralogy. 255 



any geologist who will examine the question will be convinced of 

 its truth. In Australia the facts have long been perfectly well 

 known, but in India they have only recently been fully cleared 

 up, chiefly by the progress of discovery in the Salt Range of the 

 Punjab. In South Africa the evidence is less perfect, though some 

 important additions to our knowledge have resulted from Dr. Feist- 

 mantel's examination of the fossil plants, the account of which 

 he has been so good as to send to me. In this account, which 

 reached me only two days since, the representation of the peculiar 

 Damuda flora of India in South Africa is shown to be beyond 

 question, and much moi'e complete than has hitherto been sup- 

 posed. 



" Now this flora is so strongly contrasted with the Carboniferous 

 flora of Europe that it is difficult to conceive that the countries 

 in which the two grew can have been in connection, and the 

 hypothesis of Gondwana-land, as it is termed by Suess,* a great 

 continent including Australia, India and South Africa, seems 

 more in accordance with facts than Mr. Wallace's view that 

 ' fragmentary evidence derived from such remote periods ' is 

 ' utterly inconclusive.'! For if each floi'a could be transported 

 across the sea, why are no European Carboniferous plants found 

 in the contemporaneous deposits of Gondwana-land and vice versa. 

 Carboniferous plants of the European type are not confined to 

 the northern hemisphere even, for they are found on the Zambesi 

 in Africa and in Brazil. The accounts of their occurrence in 

 Africa south of the Zambesi are as yet too indefinite for any clear 

 idea of their relations to be formed, and it remains to be seen 

 whether the Lepidodendron said to be found in Natal and the 

 Transvaal is not Lower Carboniferous or Devonian, as in 

 Australia." 



Dr. Blanford does not mention the argument the writer has 

 relied upon for evidence that continents were always continents 

 and which he has presented in publications, including his Geology, 

 for the past thirty-five years: That American geological history, 

 that is, the progress in rock- formations and in mountain elevations 

 through the successive periods, proves that there was through all 

 a continued succession of continental conditions and changes, and 

 thereby a uniform course of continental development. j. d. d. 



3. Paleozoic Fishes of North America, by J. S. Newberry. 

 228 pp. 4to, with 53 plates. U. S. Geol. Survey, Washington, 

 1889. — Prof. Newberry's new volume, besides reviewing to some 

 extent the discoveries in the Paleozoic fishes of North America, 

 hitherto reported by himself and others, gives full descriptions of 

 many new specimens and species, and the author's final opinions 

 on several debatable questions. The Pteraspids, Palmaspis Amer- 

 icana and P. bitricncata, discovered by Prof. Claypole in the 

 upper member of the Onandaga Salt Group of Pennsylvania, are 

 the only species of the Upper Silurian recognized as established. 

 The earliest Devonian species are from the Oriskany sandstone of 



* Das Antlitz der Erde, Bd. i, p. 768. f Island Life, p. 398, note. 



