53& 
The British Association. 
[October, 
Professor Haughton had been mentioned among those 
who, from mathematical considerations, have arrived at the 
conclusion that a geographical change in the position of 
the axis of rotation of the earth is not only possible but 
probable. In a recent paper, however, he has maintained 
that, notwithstanding this possibility or probability, we can 
demonstrate that the pole has not sensibly changed its 
position during geological periods. He arrives at this con- 
clusion by pointing out that in the Parry Islands, Alaska 
and Spitzbergen, there are triassic and jurassic deposits of 
much the same tropical character, and then by a geometrical 
method fixing the North Pole somewhere near Pekin, and 
the South Pole in Patagonia, within seven hundred miles of 
a spot where jurassic ammonites occur, shows that such a 
theory is untenable. In the same way he fixes the pole in 
Miocene times near Yakutsk, within eight hundred miles of 
certain Miocene coal beds of the Japanese islands. These 
objections were at first sight startling, but he (Dr. Evans) 
thought it would be found that if, instead of drawing great 
circles through certain points, we regard those points as 
merely isolated localities in a belt of considerable width, 
there is no need of fixing the pole of either the jurassic or 
the miocene period with that amount of nicety with which 
Professor Haughton has ascertained its position. The belt 
may indeed be made to contain the very places on which 
the objection is founded. One other consideration to be 
urged was as to the safety of regarding all deposits of one 
geological period as contemporaneous in time. Although 
an almost identical flora may be discovered in two widely- 
separated beds, it appeared to him that chronologically they 
are more probably of different ages than absolutely contem- 
poraneous ; and, inasmuch as the duration of the miocene 
period must have been enormous, there would be time — if 
once we assume a wandering of the poles — for such wander- 
ing to have been considerable between the beginning and 
end of the period. 
The president then adverted to the discovery of palaeozoic 
rocks under London. So long ago as 1856 the Kentish 
Town boring had shown that immediately below the Gault 
red and variegated sandstones and clays occurred, which 
Professor Prestwich regarded as probably of old red or 
Devonian age. The boring of Messrs. Meux and Co. has now 
shown that under Tottenham Court Road, at a depth of 
little more than nine hundred feet from the surface, there 
are true Devonian beds, with characteristic fossils, and that 
Mr. Godwin Austen's prophecy of the existence of palaeozoic 
