308 General Notes. [Mare 
tebrates, though the water swarmed with myriads of sharks, 
dolphins, and other vertebrates, nor had any evidence of the ex- 
istence of man been brought up in these dredges, and nothing of - 
consequence of man’s work except an India-rubber doll, that had 
been dropped overboard from some vessel. Yet the territory 
dredged was in the track of the European vessels, and where ships 
have gone down and lives been lost, but everything of this char 
acter is destroyed by the voracious animal life of the tract. These 
facts led him to doubt the negative evidence in geology, and the 
absence of vertebrates among the early fossil remains found does not | 
lead him to conclude that the mammals did not exist at that time, 
eat the bivalves and univalves alike, cracking up and throwing | 
away the shells. He also stated that the bivalves were food fot 
the cod, which digests out the meat and then spits out the shells 
— Scientific American. 
THe Tertiary Deposits oF THE ATLANTIC SrLope.—The a 
volume of the proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy 0 
Natural Sciences contains a valuable paper by Professor A. Heil 
prin, upon the relative ages and classification of the Post 
tertiary deposits of the Atlantic Slope, particularly of Mary’ 
Virginia and North and South Carolina. These were considerei 
regard 
nt of the 
Contat 
aoee LER 
concluded that his Miocene strata represented “ one contemp 
but did not institute a comparison. Professor Heilprin n 
full faunal lists of the mollusca, from which he obtains thé! gp 
ing results; The deposits of South Carolina contain 35 1037 
“fli 
