236 Davis — Framework of the Earth. 



closing with a graceful epilog by Termier, that we here 

 celebrate. 



Seventeen collaborators have translated thirty-five 

 chapters of the imposing work, but de Margerie him- 

 self, besides supervising the whole, has translated the 

 other twenty-three chapters or roughly two-fifths of the 

 whole ; and for good measure he has added many illus- 

 trations and a vast number of bracketed footnotes, and 

 has prepared a supplementary volume of 258 pages con- 

 taining an elaborate table of contents and index, con- 

 cerning all of which more is said below. The completion 

 of the work has naturally been delayed by the Great 

 War; the press of Dieval, employed by the publishing 

 house of Colin, had to be removed from one side of Paris 

 to the other as a safeguard against a threatened advance 

 of the Germans ; and the paper of the final parts is some- 

 what lighter than that previously employed, as if indi- 

 cating a war-time economy. To carry through a scientific 

 task of such magnitude during the strain of a frightful 

 invasion deserves mention along with the completion of 

 the subterranean canal near Marseilles and the finishing 

 of the tunnel under the Pyrenees in the same period of 

 fateful stress. 



It is by no means a simple translation that de Margerie 

 has given us. "La Face de la Terre" is not the work 

 of a mere bilinguist, but of a scholarly geologist, to whom 

 the literature of his science is known by content as well 

 as by title as to no other man now living. Yet the 

 French version is thoroughly loyal in presenting the 

 meaning expressed by the Austrian author in the original 

 work, unmodified by occasional better interpretations 

 that have come from later studies. Only very rarely is 

 the correction of an unsound generalization introduced, 

 and then always in recognizable form, as in the footnote 

 which briefly states that the latest researches do not 

 support the distinction- which Suess had adopted between 

 volcanic rocks of the Atlantic and the Pacific basins. 

 Where technical German terms are not completely repre- 

 sented by the French equivalents, the German words are 

 repeated in parentheses. Eeaders who prefer the simple 

 directness of French to the complicated inversions of 

 German may therefore rest assured that they will find 

 in "La Face de la Terre" all the substance that is 

 contained in "Das Antlitz der Erde." 



