306 General Notes. [May, | 
which were mammals nearly equaling the elephant in size, but with 
shorter limbs, and with a flexible nose as in the tapir, but no true pro- 
boscis. They lived in the lake basins of Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, 
and Colorado in the early Miocene Tertiary period. Figure 19 repre- 
sents a side view of the skull of Brontotherium ingens Marsh, one 
twelfth of the natural size, and Figure 20 is an outline of the skull and 
brain cavity of the same animal, one tenth of its natural size, showing 
the remarkably small size of the brain. On the plates are views of 
different parts of the skeleton and of casts of the brain cavity. 
GEOGRAPHY AND EXPLORATION. 
Is rr POSSIBLE TO UNITE THE BLACK SEA AND THE CASPIAN? — 
Major Wood answers this question in the affirmative in the Geographical 
Magazine for February. He says that though the present level of the 
Caspian Sea is about eighty-four feet below the ocean level, it must be 
remembered that the highest point in the Manytch Channel, connecting 
the Euxine and Caspian basins, is but twenty-four feet above ocean 
level. “ Manifestly, therefore, if these twenty-four feet were cut through, 
the waters of the Sea of Azof would pass into the Caspian basin and fill 
it up. Nor would such an enterprise present the shadow of a difficulty 
to the engineering genius which has already brought into being the great 
excavators that were used on the Suez Canal. 
“The result of the filling up of the Caspian basin would be the de- 
struction of Astrakhan and of all other buildings situated below ocean 
level on the Caspian littoral, and the project therefore would not appesa" 
at first sight to be a desirable one.” Its execution would increase the 
water-spread of the Caspian from an area of 140,000 square miles to one 
of 250,000 square miles, and provide an ocean route to the eastern shore 
of the Caspian, and thus aid in developing the civilization of Central 
Asia. 
Ancient GEOGRAPHERS. — It is not too much to assert, says a writer 
in the Geographical Magazine, that all the geographical achievements 
of the age, stupendous as they are, have been virtually nothing more 
than a grand and successful filling-in of the vague outlines bequeathed 
to us by the past. The Suez Canal was the idea of Pharaoh-Necho; the 
establishing of a beaten track across the Isthmus of Panama, that a 
. Cortez and Nuñez de Balboa; the Mont Cenis passage, that of Hanni 
bal; the commercial highway across Central Asia, that of Alexander the 
Great; the diverting of the Oxus into another channel (which, however, 
is scarcely possible now), that of Octai Khan; the voyage eastwa 
round the cape, that of Xerxes; the search for the source of the Nile, 
that of half a dozen Egyptian kings, as well as of their conqueror, Cam- 
byses, centuries before the Christian era; the existence of great ™ th 
seas in South Africa, that of the Portuguese explorers of the sixteen 
