350 



BOOK NOTICE. 



beds of hard blue shale of the upper lias of the zone of Ammonites communis now 

 began to appear. This shale, when weathered, breaks up into very small fragments, 

 which are unpleasantly smooth to walk upon. In the upper part of this zone are 

 the cement nodules already noted ; below these is the well-known alum shale, such 

 a profitable article of industry formerly in this district, but which has now 

 succumbed before the advance of modern chemistry. The members next came 

 upon the hard, smooth, friable shales of the zone of Ammonites serpentinus, in 

 which zone, and immediately succeeding these shales, is the compact bituminous 

 rock in which jet is found. These beds are well exposed, and some specimens of 

 jet were obtained. Here, too, a solitary jet worker was seen, hewing his \^■ay into 

 the cliff in the pursuit of his precarious livelihood. About this place Mr. Summersgill 

 found a pretty fair specimen of Ammonites elegans. Next were seen the micaceous 

 sandy shales of the zone of Ammonites annulatus, but these were much obscured 

 by the falls of sandstone from above. Continuing the arduous walk, the beds of 

 the zone of Ammonites spinatus were observed — a terrace of corrugated beds of 

 ironstone attracting much notice, this being the famous bed from which Cleveland 

 has reaped so much wealth. The first attempt to tear up the stone from its bed 

 for industrial purposes was made here by Bewick in 1827, but was soon abandoned 

 from the difficulty of transit. Turning round Kettleness, the abandoned alum 

 works were seen — a melancholy monument of a departed industiy • and turning into 

 Runswick Bay, the cliff was scaled and the train taken at Kettleness station for 

 Whitby. Comparatively few fossils were obtained, not, however, from their 

 scarcity, but from lack of time ; but it must be remembered that the members of 

 section F do not go out mere fossil-hunting for the purpose of giving a long list of 

 portentous names, but make it more a point to study the various agencies — 

 terrestrial, internal, fluviatile, and marine — which account for the various changes 

 in the earth's crust. 



The meeting concluded with a vote of thanks to Mr. Cole for his services in 

 the chair. rr^=z===: 



BOOK NOTICE. 



The Great Auk, or Garefowl (Alca impennis Linn.) : Its 

 History, Archaeology, and Remains.— By Symington Grieve, 

 Edinburgh. London : Thomas C. Jack, 45, Ludgate Hill. Edinburgh : 

 Grange Publishing Works, 1885. 

 The object of this work is a most estimable one, for the history of any animal 

 that has become extinct, even within historic times, and its rescue as far as 

 possible from oblivion, is a worthy subject for an author's pen. Especial 

 importance attaches to the subject of the volume before us, inasmuch as it has not 

 only become extinct within the memory" of persons now living, but also because it 

 was once a member of the British fauna. 



The task of a biographer must have its measure of melancholy, and the 

 historical portion of this work is far from an exception to the rule, for Mr. Grieve's 

 narrative cannot be perused without awakening a feeling of deep sympathy 

 with the harmless creature which seems to have been ' done to death ' by man's 

 sheer wantonness. We learn that in its western strongholds on the isles of the 

 great banks of Newfoundland that sailors not only used its flesh as fresh meat, 

 but even salted it down by the ton in some instances; and not content with this, 

 it is recorded that raids were made for sport, and the birds driven into compounds 

 and burnt alive ! Of its eastern habitats — which, so far as Britain is concerned, 

 included St. Kilda and the Orkneys as breeding stations — the Geirfuglasker, off the 

 west coast of Iceland, seems to have been the metropolis. Here nature, already 

 sparing in her gifts to the bird, contributed to its extinction by the submergence of 

 the islet in 1S30, and the bird was compelled to seek a suitable home, unfortunately 

 nearer to its arch enemy, with the result that the last pair were captured and their 

 egg smashed on the rock Eldy fourteen years later. A hope had been cherished 

 by some that the bird might yet exist in the remoteness of the far north, but a 

 knowledge of its distribution, which by the way is well shown in the book on an 

 excellent map, proves it to be distinctly a sub- Arctic species, and confined to the 

 north Atlantic. So m.uch for the true stor)" of the unfortunate Garefowl. Our author 

 then deals in a series of interesting chapters with the Archaeology and Re mains, and 



Naturalist, 



