388 The American Geologist. june,i89o 
The meeting was adjourned subject to the call of the Chairman. 
As soon as tlie Washington meeting of the permanent organizing 
committee was over the following letter was addressed to every mem- 
ber of the Bureau : 
April 24, 1890. 
Sir and Colleague: — 
At a session of the General Committee charged with the preparations 
for the coming meeting of the International Geological Congress, 
which session was held in Washington on April 18, 1890, it was decided 
to request the Bureau to change the place of meeting and to transfer it 
from Philadelphia to Washington, on the pretext that there was in- 
compatibility in the views of the members of the local committee con- 
sisting of Messrs. Lesley, Leidy, and Frazer. It is the duty of the 
undersigned to inform you without delay that the explanation is not 
correct. The opinion of the three members above mentioned, expressed 
at the only meeting they have held, was as harmonious and accordant 
as possible on all points. The only difference was that Prof. Lesley 
desired to yield the chairmanship of the local committee to Prof. Frazer 
on the vote of two of its members, and that the latter did not believe 
himself to be justified in accepting this arrangement without the au- 
thorization of the General Committee ; an opinion in which Prof. Leidy 
joined. But this i)oint of pure detail had nothing to do with the 
place of the meeting. 
The undersigned members of this Bureau and of the General Com- 
mittee protest against what they believe to be on the part of the General 
Committee an abuse of power delegated to it by the Congress, and they 
declare that in their opinion, this committee in proposing to the Bureau 
a change of the place originally designated has acted with out ostensible 
cause, contrai-y to the wish of the Congress expressed by an unani- 
mous vote. 
Signed, 
T. Sterry Hunt, 
Joseph Leidy, 
E. D. Cope, 
Persifor Frazer. 
REVIEW OF RECENT GEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. 
The Trenton Limestone as a source of petroleum and inflammable gas in 
Ohio and Indiana. By Edward Orton. (Extract from the Eighth 
Annual report United States Geol. Survey). 
In 1885 the Census Bureau issued a portly volume entitled "Eeport 
on the Production, Technology, and uses of Petroleum and its Prod- 
ucts," by Prof. S. F. Peckham — a work which was a marvel of com- 
pleteness and erudition and was then apparently exhaustive of all then 
known or likely to.be known of the natural history of the native petro- 
leum compounds. But now we are called upon to notice a successor 
in a monograph dealing with new data and results. 
In this memoir of 190 pages the remarkable history of the new Ohio 
gas field is eo admirably told by the veteran Ohio geologist that it 
must take a permanent place among the romances of science. It is not 
the least virtue of the book that it is decidedly readable as well as 
