1877.] Recent Literature. 167 
Over these regions, however, it is rapidly Bik a and at its pres- 
ent rate of decrease will certainly sys e wholly extinct during the 
next quarter of a century.” (Pages 54-55.) 
here can be no question that the present generation will see the 
utter extinction of the bison unless some means are speedily taken by 
the general government, or by the territories to which its range is now 
restricted, to protect it by the establishment and stringent enforcement 
of laws providing for close time and limited slaughter. One hundred 
thousand killed in four months around Fort Dodge; two hundred thou- 
sand in a single season in Kansas, merely for the hides; three thousand 
by one man in one winter, — such are the statistics to which our atten- 
tion is called. 
Mr. Allen also gives a chapter on the products of the bison, the chase, 
and the possibilities of domestication; and Professor Shaler adds an 
interesting note on its age in the Ohio Valley, where he judges that the 
animal made its advent very recently, principally because its bones 
occur at Big Bone Lick only in the more superficial strata, where they 
are exceedingly abundant. 
Professor Shaler’s paper on the. brachiopods is the first of a series, 
and treats of but a few species; these, however, are described with the 
greatest minuteness and care and very richly illustrated by heliotypes. 
In their joint essay on prehistoric remains, Messrs. Shaler and Carr 
discuss implements only, leaving other subjects for future treatment. All 
of the objects they describe and figure are “surface finds,” and they 
profess to make no attempt to assign any of the specimens that have 
come within their observation to any particular period of time or phase 
of civilization. The introductory remarks on the mode of manufactur- 
ing stone implements by savage races and the chapters on the source of 
distribution of the stone fin plemnbnth of Kentucky, and on their antiq- 
uity, will be found very interesting. 
Hancket’s Hisrory or Creation.2— Had Mr. Darwin when he 
first conceived the idea of natural selection, on his return from the 
voyage of the Beagle, had this book of Haeckel’s thrust into his hands, he 
might then have stood aghast at the lengths to which the audacious 
German author goes. Here is a petidelogtoil table of the entire or- 
ganie world — the work of how many coming centuries we dare not pre- 
dict — anticipated and set down in actual tables with all the assurance and 
confidence of an old-time prophet. The missing links even are all chris- 
tened and diagnosed, from those which he thinks connected man with the 
* If Colonel Dodge’s statements in his recently published work, The Hunting- 
Grounds of the Great West, may be trusted, the range of he bison was already much 
restricted j vais 
ry of Creation : or, the Development of the Earth and its Inhabitants by the 
eS soya al Causes. From the German of Erxst Hacker. The Translation 
revised by Prof. E. Ray Lankesrer. In 2 vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 
1876. 12mo. $5.00 
