274 
Notices of Books . [April, 
conveying the characteristics of rocks and mountains we have 
on a former occasion had the pleasure of pointing out. The 
value, or rather the necessity, of photography in scientific 
exploration is scarcely even yet fully understood by the public at 
large. We are justly told that “ twenty years ago hardly more 
than caricatures existed, as a general rule, of the leading features 
of overland exploration. Mountains were represented with 
angles of 60 degrees inclination, covered with great glaciers, and 
modelled upon the type of any other than the Rocky Mountains ; 
the angular lines of a sandstone mesa represented with all the 
peculiarities of volcanic upheaval or of massive granite.” 
The total number of negatives in the possession of the Survey 
amounts to nearly four thousand. 
Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical 
Survey of the Territories. Vol. iii., No. 4; Vol. iv., No. 1. 
Washington : Government Printing-Office. 
This number is devoted to zoology, recent and fossil. The first 
paper, by Mr. S. H. Scudder, contains a description of certain 
fossil insedts discovered in the Tertiary beds of White River, on 
the borders of Colorado and Utah. With the possible exception 
of four specimens from the Miocene of North Greenland, they 
are the first insedts found in the Tertiary strata of America. 
There are in the collection no Lepidoptera, nor has the author 
yet met with any fossil species of this order of American origin, 
and no Orthoptera. More than one-half the species are Diptera, 
thus showing that these creatures — whose absence would be one 
of the essential requisites of a “ golden age ” — must have existed 
from a very early date in the Western Hemisphere. There are 
three Hymenoptera, four Hemiptera, one Neuropterous insect, 
and nine Coleoptera. The relative proportion of insedts of 
different orders found in various deposits is of course a document 
of the highest value as regards their origin. If we consider 
that the Diptera, from their fragility, are about the least likely 
insedts to be preserved, it will, we think, be allowed that in the 
Tertiary times they must have been relatively more abundant 
than in the present day. Among the Coleoptera the absence of 
Buprestidae is remarkable. 
There is a description of two fossil Carabs found in the Inter- 
glacial deposits of Scarboro’ Heights, Toronto; a catalogue of 
the insedts colledted by Dr. Uhler during the explorations of 
1875, with notices of their localities, times of appearance, &c. 
There are also papers on Camharus Couesi, a new crawfish from 
Dakota ; on a carnivorous Dinosaurian from the Dakota beds of 
Colorado ; a notice on the ichthyological fauna of the Green 
River Shales ; and an account of the genus Erisichthe . 
