420 Tne American Geologist. December, 1897 
Oct. 27). Tlie northern side of Hudson strait is tiie south 
side of Bartinland, which is the tliird island in size in the 
world, surpassed only by Australia and Greenland, being 1100 
miles in length. The western portion of this island along the 
south coast is high and rocky, rising 1000 to 2000 feet above 
the sea, but the eastern half of the southern coast is not moun- 
tainous, but rather low. Dr. Bell was recently elected a fel- 
low of the Royal Society of London. 
Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, lecturing in the United States, is over- 
whelmed with the cordiality of his welcome in the cities of 
the Northwest, and is obliged to decline most of the recep- 
tions and banquets which are tendered him. Recently at Min- 
neapolis he gave two lectures to large audiences, English and 
Norwegian, and was escorted to the hall by a Norwegian torch 
light procession, and after the English lecture he was given 
a select reception by the Minnesota • Academy of Natural 
Sciences. 
Dr. E. W. Clatpole, of Akron, O., is spending tlie winter in 
New Mexico. 
The Strdcture of the Urals. Dr. Persifor Frazer, in a 
report recently made to the Philadelphia Academy of Scien- 
ces of his late visit to St. Petersburg and excursion to the 
Urals, gave the following description : 
"Another curious circumstance is that the Ural range is only half a 
range, since there is no mountainous part on the west side at all. The 
structure is like that in some of our mountain gorges when on climbing 
up from a stream level over the rough basset edges of a hill we find on 
arriving at the top a gently sloping arable plain, extending unbroken, 
as far as the eye can reach. 
"This is the case with this chain throughout its entire length. Erup- 
tive and massive, and metamorphic rocks, all ascribed by the Russian 
geologists to the lower Devonian or much later epochs, are found in in- 
explicable confusion, and the almost universal accompaniments to rock 
coufusion, mineral veins of great intrinsic and scientific value. Here 
are found the Ilmen mountains, with their marvelous minerals, some of 
them unique. Here are the gold and platinum placers and the gangues 
with these metals in place, the latter being termed proudly by the Rus- 
sians an exclusively Ural element." 
