
730 The American Naturalist. [August, 
from the north, and about 200 feet of strata (Chesapeake Group) were 
deposited, equivalent to the well-known Miocene beds of Virginia 
and Maryland. With the elevation which connected the Floridan 
islands with the continent a warmer era was again inaugurated in the 
sea, and an invasion of Pliocene vertebrates began on the peninsula of 
Florida. 
‘ There were unquestionably great changes of level on the conti- 
nent, increasing as one goes northward, both in Miocene and Pileisto- 
cene times. Inthe Antilles it has been proved that great changes 
have taken place. But the Floridan region, for some unknown rea- 
son, escaped, and Yucatan probably also. 
‘ I have been making a special study of Floridan geology for some 
years, and hope to publish a considerable amount of new information 
on that subject during the coming summer.’’ 
Discovery of Coal near Dover, England.—In the Contem- 
porary Review, April, 1890, Professor W. Boyd Dawkins gives a his- 
tory of the discovery of coal in Southeastern England, As far back 
as 1826 Buckland and Conybeare recognized the physical identity of 
the coal-bearing districts of Somerset on the west with those of North- 
ern France and Belgium on the east. In 1855 Godwin-Austen showed 
that the general direction of the exposed coal fields in South Wales 
and Somersetshire and those of North France and Belgium was ruled 
by a series of folds running east and west parallel to a great line of 
disturbance centered in the ‘‘ axis of Artois,’’ and concluded, from a 
careful study of the region, that there are coal fields beneath the 
OGlitic and Cretaceous rocks in the south of England, near enough to 
the surface along the ridge to be capable of being worked. His views 
were reinforced by Prestwich, in a report made to the Coal Commis- 
sion of 1866—71. At length, in consequence of a report made by Mr. 
Dawkins to Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of the Southeastern Rail- 
way and the Channel Tunnel Company, a shaft was sunk on the west 
side of Shakespeare Cliff, near Dover, to the depth of forty-four feet, 
and from the bottom of this a bore-hole has been made to the depth 
of 1,180 feet. The Coal Measures were struck at a depth of 1,204 feet 
from the surface, and a seam of good blazing coal was met with twenty 
feet lower. This discovery establishes the fact that there is a coal field 
lying buried under the newer deposits of Southeastern England, and 
proves up to the hilt the truth of Godwin-Austen’ s hypothesis, after a 
lapse of thirty-five snes 


