1212 General Notes. | December, 
in the faunas of the Pacific Coast waters and those eastward of 
them. The Sierras and Coast ranges are referred to a single 
mountain system. . D. Achiardi gives the particulars of an 
examination into the macroscopical and microscopical characters 
of the trachyte and quartziferous porphyry of Donoratice, near 
Pisa, Italy. The trachyte is covered, here and there only, with 
Eocene sediments which seem to have been disturbed by the 
eruption. The porphyry traverses the parti-colored schists of 
the Upper Lias and also the marbles of the Lower Lias, and is 
only about 400 meters distant from the trachyte, the space be- 
tween being occupied by Eocene sediments. D’Achiardi finds 
the materials of these two rocks to be chemically the same, and 
the mineral species contained in them, for the most part, identi- 
cal, but while the trachyte has cooled rapidly upon the surface of 
the rocks, the porphyry was intruded through them, and cooled 
slowly. The same mineralogist notes the presence in the Apuan 
Alps of tormalinolite. 
more pronounced, consisting of loops, convex usually toward the 
west and south, but in rare cases toward the north-west. Traces 
of four great lobes of the ice-sheet, pushing through from the 
James to the Missouri, can be found. 
MINERALOGY AND PETROGRAPHY.' 
METEORITES.—A number of very important contributions to 
the literature of these interesting bodies, which reach our globe 
directly from the regions of space, have recently been published. 
_ Papers relating to meteorites have heretofore been largely con- 
_ fined to detailed descriptions of particular falls. With the ex- 
eption of Rose’s essay on the classification of these bodies, little 
of a general nature regarding them has been produced until 
ithin the past year or two. Now, however, we have at least four 
by Dr. Geo. H. WittaMs, of the Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, Md. 
