e 
Den of the Tertiary formation of the West. Book I. 
372 Recent Literature. [April, 
was not bad eating, tasting like coarse beef. Seal’s flippers we 
also found not to be distasteful, though never to be regarded as 
a delicacy. 
Dredging and collecting insects on fine days when not too 
calm filled up the measure of our seven weeks. The time passed 
rapidly, the days were too short for all the work we planned to 
do, and it was not without regret that we left the rugged un- 
tamed shores of the Labrador. On the afternoon of the very day 
she had set for her return to Caribou island, the Nautilus hove in 
sight. As she made our harbor she struck upon a sunken 
rock, tore off a piece of her keel, but slid off and came to anchor 
as near as practicable to the mission house, and then succeeded 
the mutual spinning of Labrador and Greenland yarns by the 
reunited party. 
‘oO: 
RECENT LITERATURE. 
Copr’s VERTEBRATA OF THE TERTIARY FORMATIONS OF THE 
West.\—Just ten years ago (1875) a bulky quarto volume on the 
Vertebrata of the Cretaceous formation of the West, by Professor 
Cope, appeared, forming the second volume of the memoirs of 
the Hayden Geological Survey of the Territories. The ponder- 
ous volume now before us contains between three and four times 
as many- pages and about fifty more plates. The work is de- 
signed to present figures and descriptions of the vast number of 
species of vertebrates of all classes, but more especially of the 
mammals of the Tertiary lake-basins of the West. For the first 
time the palzontologist has before him the materials for a view 
of that rich fauna which through the Tertiary period crowded 
the shores of the immense lakes whose sediments form the surface 
‘of our Western plains—a fauna whose descendants, vastly less in 
number though more highly specialized, still survive on this con- 
tinent. 
The subject is naturally the most attractive the palzeontologist 
could have presented to him, since the materials represent a num- 
ber of extinct orders, suborders and families, which fill more or 
less completely the wide gaps between the existing orders of 
mammals, and enable the student to examine the foundations, so 
to speak, upon which the existing groups have been built up; 
this, of course, has led not only to the solution of knotty points 
_ in classification, but to broader conceptions of the relations of the 
MATES. Geological Survey of the Territories. F. V. Hayden in charge. The Ver- 
a of By Epwarp D. COPE. 
h ee ren 1883-4. 4to, pp. 1009, with over 100 plates and numerous wood-cuts 
