§24 General Notes. 
the latter 2,000,000 are in the Khanate of Bokhara, the remainder 
in Khiva and Afghan Turkistan. 
The Proceedings of the Royal Geog. Soc., May 1888, contains a 
map of Mr. F. C. Selong’ explorations in the Matabele and Mashuna 
countries, giving the routes of the various rivers and the posi- 
tion of the hill ranges with greater accuracy than any other previ- 
ous map. 
The death is announced of the celebrated Russian, Nicholas von 
Miklucho-Maclay, whose name has so long been prominent in 
connection with explorations in New Guinea. His residence in that 
country impaired his health, and in 1882 he returned to Russia. 
After this he resided awhile in Sydney (Australia) where he founded a 
biological station, and then again returned to Russia, where he 
resided at the time of his death, at the age of forty-two years. 
GEOLOGY AND PALAZONTOLOGY. 
GEOLOGICAL News.—Siiurian, ETC.—Dr. John Walther, in 
his researches into the structure of the crinoids (Paleontographica, 
Band 32), traces the entire group to a bilateral ancestral form, rep- 
resented by the Pelmatozoa of the Pre-Cambrian, and considers the 
Ateleocystites of the Lower Silurian as a reversion to this ancestral 
and larval form. This is followed by an “acyclical” holosym- 
metrical form, exemplified by Macrocystella, the oldest Cambrian 
Pelmatozoan. From this form two series arise—on one hand, the 
Cystoids, on the other, the Crinoidea. 
Drvontan.—M. Maurice Gordon has discovered in the Valley 
of l’Arboust, in the Pyrenees, a schistose deposit with trilobites 
which are entirely new to the French fauna and ascend to an epoch 
that has recently been studied between the Hartz and the Ural. 
These trilobites include two new species of Bronteus and one each 
of Dalmanites, Lichas, Cyphaspis, and Harpes. M. Chas. Barrois 
states that the fauna is more recent than the Silurian stage of 
Bohemia and older than the Coblencian stage of the Devonian. , 
M. Chas. Barrois has identified twenty-eight species of crinoids, 
brachiopods, trilobites, etc., occurring in the singular sedimentary 
limestone of the quarry of Vallet, near Chaudefonds (France). 
Though this thin bed is certainly Devonian, it has not yet been cor- 
related with the other Devonian bands of the region, but seems to 
form an islet in the midst of red and green schists, which are by 
some referred to the Lower Silurian, by others to the Upper 
Devonian, or even to the Carboniferous. The trilobites are Seas 
but the brachiopods and crinoids are Devonian, and the fossils, a8 
