The Lower Severn Plain during the Glacial Period. 97 
Marine shells in a very fragmentary condition are found, 
but these would not call for more than moderate encroachment 
of the sea, and afford no evidence of a great Post-cretaceous 
submergence of the whole of the Plain. The list of shells 
recorded by Allies, Murchison. Lloyd, and Lucy is given 
without critical remarks, for it is obviously impossible to 
impugn the identifications of authors long dead, and equally 
to contradict their statements, at the same time the present 
writer claims the privilege of uttering a word of warning 
against a too trustful acceptance of some of them, especially 
‘ Oliva ’ ‘ found in good preservation under twelve feet of 
gravel by Strickland and Allies.’ If the shell was indeed 
found by those two gentlemen, and not acquired from the 
nomadic navvy who carries geological treasures from one job 
to another, and occasionally imposes upon the unwary, then 
we must find some explanation of the apparition of an exotic 
like Oliva in amongst a very typical assemblage of modern 
British shells. I throw out the suggestion that the shell 
might have been V oluto-mitra Greenlandica, a species recorded 
from the Manx Glacials, but the ‘ navvy ’ hypothesis is to 
me the more acceptable — anything, however, is less improbable 
than that a true Olive was a real constituent of the Post- 
Tertiary fauna of the Severn estuary. 
A full list of mammalian remains is given. Would that 
some potent spiritualist medium would use the word of power, 
and call up Strickland, Maw r , Lucy, and the rest of those 
painstaking observers who record ‘ Elephant, Rhinoceros,’ and 
ask them to signify by appropriate raps upon the table whether 
their elephants had straight or curly tusks, and whether they 
would kindly state for the benefit of a sorely tantalized 
posterity whether their Rhinoceros commonly wore a woolly 
coat. The omission of this rather vital information is not 
chargeable to Mr. Gray, but to the authors whom he quotes, 
and we may hope that, as he proceeds with his self-imposed 
task of reviewing the whole field of the Superficial Geology of 
the Severn system, he will continue to record with the same 
completeness and imperturbability all the data, whether fully 
intelligible or not, just as he finds them. — P. F. K. 
: o : 
The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries has recently issued Leaflet 2S1, 
dealing with the Apple Leaf-spot (Sphoevopsis malorum). 
Mr. W. H. St. Quintin, J.P., has been elected President of the 
Yorkshire Philosophical Society in succession to the late Dr. Tempest 
Anderson. 
We learn from the press that ‘ Ringed on the leg as a nestling in August 
last year, on Fame Island, a cormorant has been shot at Filey. It had 
been observed fishing very actively and destructively for two hours 
immediately before falling to the gun.’ Moral : Don’t fish at Filey. 
1914 Mar. 1. 
