148 
REVIEWS. 
&c. Were a Table of this kind drawn up with the care, patience, and 
constant exercise of judgment necessary for its preparation, the results 
so obtained would be invaluable to the student of Palaeontology, who 
would find it a complete abstract of the existing state of our knowledge 
of the distribution of organized beings in time. And such an abstract, 
there can be little doubt, the present Table would have been, had not 
death deprived Mr. Jukes of the assistance of one whose time and genius 
had alike been devoted to the consideration of the relations which the 
members of the organic world bear to one another, and to the external 
conditions in which they are placed; and whose well-known Essay on 
the “Distribution of the Plants and Animals of the British Islands ” has 
been justly characterized by an eminent authority as “the most impor¬ 
tant contribution to the philosophy of distribution that has ever ap¬ 
peared.” It is otherwise, however, with his surviving colleague. In 
the first portion of Mr. Jukes’s work we have seen him wield his pen, 
not without success, in the discussion of doctrines with which he had 
long been familiar, and in the treatment of details many of which he 
could amply corroborate from the results of his own extended personal 
experience. But when he comes to speak of Palaeontology, he adopts a 
course the reverse of the preceding: laying aside his pen, like the editors 
of certain newspapers, he takes up the scissors in its stead. The palaeon¬ 
tological portion of his work consists, in short, of little else than a judi¬ 
cious selection of neatly clipped fragments from the voluminous treatise 
of Pictet, interspersed with occasional derivations from the writings 
of other eminent authorities. To the naked eye the aspect presented 
by the last 250 pages of his work is exceedingly repulsive, closely re¬ 
sembling that of a vast dictionary, containing several thousand long 
Latin names, the mere endeavour to spell which would be in itself no 
ordinary task. Upon more minute examination, several errors and in¬ 
accuracies maybe detected, appearing conspicuously amid this cumbrous 
mass, of which the following may be noticed as a sample of the rest:— 
In the “ Abstract of Eossil Genera” we are told that the genus Dendro- 
pora is characteristic of the Devonian formation; whereas, on turning to 
another portion of the work, we find it stated that it takes its rise in, 
and does not survive, the Carboniferous period. At page 370 the author 
enters into a vehement protest against the “cumbrous” nomenclature 
of Milne-Edwards and Haime, and strongly objects to their system of 
affixing the same termination to several allied genera—e. g., Isastraea, 
Thamnastra, &c.; whereas he himself, by the adoption of a number of 
false genera not admitted by these zoologists, has incumbered the subject 
with many unnecessary difficulties. The Table at page 382, showing the 
comparative number of the living and fossil species of the British islands, 
in the compilation of which the author has been assisted by his colleague, 
Dr. Kinahan, is drawn up in a hasty and inconsiderate manner. So nu¬ 
merous, in short, are the errors contained in the Palaeontological Tables 
of Mr. Jukes, that it would seem as if, through a desire to direct the at¬ 
tention of the student to his own more favourite branch of the subject, 
namely, Physical Geology, he had endeavoured to render the palaeonto¬ 
logical portion of it as disagreeable as possible. 
