266 General Notes. | March, 
writer describes the route from Lao-Kai on the Red river of Ton- 
quin, to Mengtsze in Yunnan. He is not enthusiastic about any 
of the routes from Tonquin, though he thinks France has as much 
chance of getting the China trade as any of her rivals. The 
route from Lao-Kai to Manhao is by river, but from the head of 
navigation to the plateau of Yunnan the coast is extremely diffi- 
cult and mountainous.——-Commander Réveilliere has succeeded 
GEOLOGY AND PALAONTOLOGY. 
Tue Enctish Cretaczous.—With the Cretaceous, or rather 
with that indefinite age which intervened between the close of the 
Cretaceous and the dawn of the Eocene, unrepresented by any 
stratified rock in England, we close the book on the evolution 
of Gymnosperms for nearly all the archaic anomalous genera 
which held the place of our larches, pines and spruces, cypresses 
and junipers, had given way to living genera and even species. 
It is a remarkable fact that the extermination of so much that 
_ It appears that during the chalk formation a great wave of 
depression passed across Europe, traveling from the West to the 
East, permitting the ingress of the Atlantic, and forming a gulf 
