Personal and Scientific News. 407 
American Ckinoids. The first hundred pages of Wachsmuth 
and Springer's long expected monograph on American crin- 
oids have left the press. The work has developed greatly 
since first planned and has prolonged the time of its appear- 
ance much beyond the date originally set. The camarate 
crinoids which form the part now being issued are comprised 
in two large quarto volumes, one of text containing over 600 
pages, and the other of plates nearly 100 in number. The 
latter have been beautifully reproduced by the best of modern 
processes. The work is issued by the Museum of Compara- 
tive Zoology of Cambridge; and the edition is limited to 750 
copies. It embodies the results of what is doubtless the fin- 
est piece of paleontological investigation ever undertaken in 
this country; and it may be regarded as a model of modern 
methods. It is the outcome of thirty-five years constant and 
untiring effort; these two volumes constitute the first half of 
the entire work. When completed it will form one of those 
works which will be the standard of reference for a century 
to come. 
The Stanford University has recently obtained a cast of a 
vertebral column and ribs found fossil in a marine shaly 
sandstone formation of Miocene age, at an altitude of 1,400 
feet above the sea, near Roblar, California. The resemblance 
to man is very remarkable, but Pres. D. S. Jordan, of the 
university, thinks that more probably it was some species of 
sloth. Prof. J. P. Smith states that it might be readily pro- 
nounced a fossil man, if the rock formation were recent. "To 
be sure," he remarks, "a river might have brought the dead 
man, sloth, or whatever it was, to the ocean, and the currents 
might have carried it out, but it certainly seems more reason- 
able to suppose some aquatic creature left its imprint there." 
— San Franc/sco Examiner, N~ov. .£. 1894> 
The glacial geology op Mt. Kenya in eastern Africa, sit- 
uated on the ecpiator, about 150 miles east of the lake Victoria 
Nyanza, is described by Dr. J. W. Gregory in the Quarterly 
Journal of the Geological Society of London (vol. 50, pp. 515- 
530, Nov. 1st, 1894). The mountain attains a hight of about 
19,500 feet and covers an area of about 700 square miles. The 
existing glaciers, one of which is named in memory of the late 
Prof. Henry Carvill Lewis, descend to the altitude of 15,300 
feet. Former glaciation, at so recent a time that the striatum 
of boulders and of the bedrock is retained wherever it has 
been protected by a covering of soil, reached 5,500 feel lower, 
or to D.SOO feet above the sea. Lake basins, moraines, rounded 
rock surfaces, and glacial stria-, attest the former envelopment 
of the whole upper part of Mt. Kenya by an ice-cap, of which 
the present glaciers are puny remnants. The cause of the 
