354 Scientific Intelligence. 



N. W. to S. AV. and N. E. to S. W. Of these series the earliest, 

 the E.-AY., features were caused by the buckling of the earth's 

 crust in Mesozoic times. The diagonal series are the peripheral 

 fractures around the sinking Indian Ocean betwe<^"n the end of 

 the Cretaceous and the Oligocene. The last series, the N.-S. 

 fractures, . . . were results of the world-wide mountain-forming 

 disturbances which culminated in the Miocene, but lasted from 

 the Oligocene to the Pliocene" (p. 375). 



'' Africa, as a whole, remained throughout the Kainozoic Era 

 as a raised and, judging from its river system, as a still rising 

 plateau. But, since the crust on both sides sank during the for- 

 mation of the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans, Africa was left 

 unsupported laterally. Instead of its main highland axis being 

 laterally compressed like the coastlands of the Pacific, Africa was 

 in tension and torn by N. and S. fractures, along which the sink- 

 ing of a strip of the crust formed the longest meridional land val- 

 ley on earth. The Great Kift Valley is, therefore, due to a long 

 series of earth-movements which began in the Cretaceous, and to 

 faults formed at intervals between the Oligocene and the 

 Pliocene. It owes its unique character to its position anti- 

 podal to the Pacific, and its course to the wrench in the 

 crust of the Eastern Hemisphere between the segment pressing 

 northward against Europe and that pressing southward in Asia 

 toward the deepening basin of the Indian Ocean" (pp. 378-9). 



c. s. 



2. The Fish Fauna of the California Teriiary; by David 

 Starr Jordan. Stanford Univ. Pub., Biological Sciences, vol. 

 1, No. 4, pp. 235-300, 57 pis., 1921.— Chancellor Emeritus Jordan 

 in this memoir makes "old bones live again" through restora- 

 tions in the flesh 'of nearly all the bony fishes, predatory or other- 

 wise, known from the California Tertiary. The restorations, 

 which are the work of W. S. Atkinson, are the first presented of 

 American Tertiary fishes. The work treats of seventy-eight 

 species, of which fifty-seven are pictured in the flesh; most of 

 them are from the Middle Miocene. 



The present fish fauna of California "is derived from that of 

 the Miocene period with a certain admixture from the north and 



from Japan The Miocene temperature differed little 



from that which obtains at present .... The climate was arid. ' ' 



In the same diatom deposits which have so many fishes there 

 are almost no other kinds of fossils except an occasional 

 radiolarian and sponge spicules. Albert Mann reports pro- 

 visionally on the diatoms, listing about fifty species at each of 

 two horizons, while the great Lompoc zone has yielded far over 

 a hundred species, and these ' ' appear to be only a small fraction 

 of the diatom wealth" of this zone. c. s. 



3. The Jurassic Ammonite Fauna of Ciiha; by Marjorie 



