1921 .] 
University and Scientific News. 
267 
The consideration of questions of a general character will be placed on the order 
paper of the meeting. 
Further circulars will make known the details of the organization. 
We are convinced that you will give your valuable assistance, and we thank you 
in advance. 
For the Organizing Committee : 
The President, 
Jean Lebacqz, Director-General of Mines, 
President of the Geological Society of Belgium. 
The Secretary, 
Armand Renier, Chief of the Geological Survey of 
Belgium. 
P.S.—We would be obliged if you would be good enough to give this letter all 
desirable publicity, and especially to reproduce it in your publications. 
Moreover, the lists of addresses at our disposal being old, you would render a great 
service by making for us a list of persons to whom we could usefully send further 
circulars. 
Address all communications to the secretariat— Service Geologique de Belgique, 
Palais du Cinquantenaire, Bruxelles. 
REVIEWS AND ABSTRACTS. 
Climatic Cycles and Evolution, by Griffith Taylor. Geographical Review , 
vol. 8, pp. 289-328, 1919. 
The Evolution and Distribution of Race, Culture, and Language, by 
Griffith Taylor. Ibid,, vol. 11, pp. 54-117, 1921. 
Ethnology receives yet another adherent from among the geologists 
in Dr. Griffith Taylor, of Sydney, well known for his geological, physio- 
graphical, and climatological work in Australia and Antarctica. Ethnologists 
will welcome him gladly, for their science has gained much in the past from 
men whose training has been in geology—Powell, for example, and many 
more. Nor is it solely the personal service that has counted, for some of 
the most fertile conceptions in the whole science have been brought over 
from geology—the concept of stratification in race or culture, for example, 
which is fundamental in ethnology, and the concept of contact meta¬ 
morphism, introduced by T. H. Holland. On the side of organization the 
debt is equally great, for the admirable Bureaus of Ethnology both in 
Canada and the United States have developed out of the Geological 
Surveys of those countries. 
What will the first impressions be of the brotherhood into which this 
new and dashing member has stepped ? First of all, no doubt, they will 
feel gratitude for two important contributions to their science ; in the 
second place they may feel a trifle doubtful at the unbounded confidence 
of the new-comer ; and finally, turning from the two contributions already 
mentioned, they will gaze with interest at the store of astonishing novelties 
he has to offer. 
In the earlier of his two papers Dr. Taylor 44 attempted to show that 
the chief ethnological characters of man developed largely as the result of 
marked changes of climate during the Pleistocene age. 
“ I showed,” he says, “ that the various races are distributed in zones 
about central Asia. The most primitive races, the primitive Negritos, 
