From time to time during the last two years brief accounts of a remarkable series of vertebrate remains, from the Middle and Upper Eocene of the Fayûm district of Egypt, have been published in the pages of this Magazine. The species hitherto described include a number of highly interesting animals, but of the most extraordinary of all, viz. Arsinöitherium Zitteli, no figure has yet appeared in this Journal. We are therefore glad to take the opportunity of remedying this omission by availing ourselves of the kind permission of the Editor of The Sphere to reproduce two photographs of the skull of this animal, which appeared in the pages of that journal on September 12th, 1903, as illustrations of a short article by Professor E. Ray Lankester, which is the first account of Arsinöitherium published in this country, and from which some extracts are given below.

The most interesting series of specimens in this collection comes from Desolation Valley glacier, on the southern side of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and east of the watershed. These are: (1) A roughly pentagonal slab, about 9½″ by 7″ and from ¾″ to 1″ thick, of a rather fine-grained quartzite, with some minute glittering crystals, but giving little or no effervescence with cold HCl. The surface is crowded with wavy cylinders, generally slightly flattened, varying in diameter from about ·55″ to ·15″ (but commonly about ·55″).

The recent retirement of Professor Albert Jean Gaudry, who for fifty years has been associated with the Jardin des Plantes, gives us an opportunity of presenting our readers with his portrait.

Born in 1827, he started for Cyprus and Greece at the age of 25, on what was destined to prove an epoch-making visit, for while there he obtained satisfactory information about the rich deposit of vertebrata at Pikermi, which he afterwards visited. The results of his labours are embodied in the classic “Animaux fossiles et Géologie de l'Attique” (1862–67), and a new world of vertebrate life was fully opened to zoologists, of which the first glimpse had been obtained by Wagner. But perhaps the best known of Gaudry's writings is his “Enchainements du monde animal dans les temps géologiques” (1878), reprinted in 1895, a work which has had great influence on the younger school of thought (see Geol. Mag., 1878, pp. 221–227, and 1884, pp. 32–40).

Appointed Assistant to Professor Alcide d'Orbigny (the first to hold the Chair of Palaeontology at the Jardin des Plantes) in 1853, while still in Cyprus, he succeeded Edouard Lartet in that Chair in 1872. He was Vice-Secretary of the Geological Society of France in 1852, Secretary in 1854, and President in 1863, 1878, and 1887; while in 1900 he presided over the Meetings of the Eighth International Congress of Geology, held in Paris.

Gaudry's first published works dealt with Starfishes (1852) and the Origin of Flint (1852), but soon afterwards he confined himself to Vertebrate Palaeozoology, with a result that is known to even the most superficial student of the science throughout the world.

The sudden disappearance of groups of animals, which have existed through long periods of time and have attained a high degree of specialization, is a phenomenon of which many instances will occur to every student of Palæozoology. For instance, to mention only two cases in illustration, we may refer to the disappearance of the Dinosaurs at the end of the Secondary period, and that of the North American Titanotheres in the Miocene. Of the proximate causes of this extinction little is known: they must have been either inherent in the organisms themselves, or have been connected with the relations of the organisms with their environment; probably in every case several factors co-operated to bring about the observed result. In a recent paper by Mr. C. B. Crampton (Proc. Roy. Phys. Soc. Edinburgh, vol. xiv, p. 461) a possible inherent cause of extinction is suggested. It is impossible to do justice to this interesting paper in a short note, but the gist of the argument seems to be as follows:—In the original unicellular organism the possibilities of variation are almost infinite, but as soon as evolution along any line begins, these possibilities are restricted, and become more and more so the more highly specialized the animal is; in short, the potential variation of an organism becomes less and less as specialization advances. Furthermore, under the influence of natural selection, in each generation the individuals which tend to vary in the same direction will survive, while at the same time, as already pointed out, their capacity for variation becomes more and more restricted.

The specimens, etc., upon which the following notes are based were sent from China by the Rev. Samuel Couling, M.A., to Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., who has kindly permitted me to examine them. They consist of two examples displayed in longitudinal section upon the surface of two blocks of limestone, and photographs of three other examples, together with the rubbing of a fourth similarly preserved.

The genus Brachymetopus was founded by McCoy in 1847, and the generic characters were drawn from the Australian species Br. Strzeleckii, McCoy, which was at the same time described. The specific characters of this form were very briefly given, the leading features having been mentioned in the diagnosis of the genus. Dr. Henry Woodward in 1884 gave a new summary of the generic characters differing somewhat from that originally furnished by McCoy, being modified in such a way as to include the European or British species, Br. ouralicus, De Vern., Br. Maccoyi, Portl., Br. discors, McCoy, and Br. hibernicus, Woodw. The original type-specimens of Br. Strzeleckii used by McCoy (op. cit.) in drawing up the description of the genus, and figured by him at the same time, are in the Woodwardian Museum, to which they were presented in the year 1844 by the Rev. W. B. Clarke. They come from the Carboniferous Shale of Dunvegan, New South Wales. The specimens comprise three complete head-shields, two of which are hollow impressions and one a cast, and portions of three or four others; there are also three casts of complete pygidia, one perfect impression, and fragments of two others. This material demands a fuller description of the specific characters than McCoy furnished, particularly as this type-form of Brachymetopus shows features differing in several respects from those of the better known European species ascribed to the same genus. McCoy's description (op. cit.) of the species was as follows:—

“Glabella widest at the base, with one very minute, obscurely marked, cephalothoracic furrow at the base on each side; all the segments of the pygidium with an irregularly tuberculated ridge along the middle; lateral segments forming large tubercles where they join the thickened limb, opposite each of which is a short slender spine projecting from the margin”.

Students of palæobotany, when concerned with casts and impressions of fossil plants as distinguished from petrifactions, have often to face difficulties in the course of their examination of such remains, some of which are peculiar to this branch of palæontology. Even when a large number of specimens of any particular type of foliage, or other organs, are available for comparison, it is often difficult to decide how far one set of casts and impressions can be regarded as distinct from another. Authorities differ in their ideas of the aggregate of differences necessary to constitute genera and species. This difficulty, although common to the systematist in the study of recent plants, is greatly intensified when dealing with fossils, on account of the fragmentary nature of the evidence.

From the days when Nimrod began to be “a mighty hunter before the Lord,” down to those in which our friend Fred. C. Selous shot ‘big game’ in Africa, the hunter has always occupied a specially exalted position and enjoyed a much envied notoriety in all countries. But alas for the wild animals! they are now rapidly becoming exterminated by man, and their place on the prairie, the pampa, the veldt, and in the forest will soon know them no more.

Through the intervention of my friend Mr. William Whitaker, F.R.S., I, some time ago, received from Mr. G. W. Colenutt, F.G.S., of Hanway Lodge, Ryde, Isle of Wight, 26 small slabs of Osborne clay, on which are preserved, in a more or less good state (generally less), a series of prawns and small shrimp-like Crustaceans, collected by him from the Oligocene strata, Chapelcorner Copse, between King's Quay and Wootton Creek, just to the west of the Boat-house, on the shore below Binstead House; also on the shore below Ryde House, and immediately to the south-east of Sea View Pier; where (especially at Chapelcorner Copse) extremely interesting exposures of the Osborne Beds may be seen and studied, between the base of the cliff and low-water mark (see p. 99).

The paper by Dr. Callaway, “On a Cause of River Curves,” in the Geological Magazine for October, 1902, suggests comment for two reasons: first, because the cause that he brings forward seems of doubtful application; second, because the habitual entrance of branch streams at a certain part of the curves of main streams is satisfactorily explained by controls which seem to be of surer and more powerful application than the control which he advocates.

In ascribing to a tributary the power to make a main stream bend in a definite manner towards the tributary, and thus determine the habitual entrance of tributaries on the convex side of the main stream's curves, Dr. Callaway argues that the detritus brought by the tributary will be deposited on the further side of the main stream and somewhat below the tributary's mouth. Various examples known to me of the deposits formed by side streams in the channels of main streams do not bear out this conclusion: the detritus is not deposited on the further side of the main stream, but as a delta at the mouth of the tributary or a little below it; and the main stream does not bend toward, but away from the tributary. The Rhine, the Colorado, and many other rivers that might be instanced, show abundant examples of this kind. Moreover, the assumption of an initially straight main river, as stated by Dr. Callaway, involves an extreme improbability. Rivers cannot be habitually straight in their initial stage, and the bends with which they begin are as a rule spontaneously exaggerated in their later development.

At the Leeds Meeting of the British Association in 1890, my old friend Professor A. H. Green delivered an address to the Section which has generally been regarded as expressing an opinion adverse to the use of the science of geology as an educational agent. Some of the expressions used by him, if taken alone, certainly seem to bear out this interpretation. For instance, he says: “Geologists are in danger of becoming loose reasoners”; further he says: “I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that when geology is to be used as a means of education there are certain attendant risks that need to be carefully and watchfully guarded against.” Then he adds: “Inferences based on such incomplete and shaky foundations must necessarily be largely hypothetical.”

Such expressions, falling from an accomplished mathematician and one who was such an eminent field geologist as Professor Green, the author of some of the most trustworthy and most useful of the Geological Survey memoirs, and above all one of the clearest of our teachers and the writer of the best and most eminently practical textbook on physical geology in this or any other language, naturally exercised great influence on contemporary thought. And I should be as unwise as I am certainly rash in endeavouring to controvert them but for the fact that I think he only half believed his own words. He remarks that “to be forewarned is a proverbial safeguard, and those who are alive to a danger will cast about for a means of guarding against it.

In the following note I propose to give a brief account of the chief results obtained during an expedition to the Fayûm in the early part of the present year (1903). The localities in which collections were made lie to the north of the lake Birket-el-Kerun, and are almost the same as those examined on previous occasions. Practically nothing was found in the Middle Eocene beds, but from those of Upper Eocene age a fairly large collection of vertebrate remains, including several new forms, was obtained. A few interesting tilings were also found in the Quaternary lake-beds in the neighbourhood of Schweinfurth's Temple (Qasr-es-Sagha); these will be referred to more fully below.

The Geological Department at Cambridge is at length provided with adequate accommodation by its transference to the new Sedgwick Memorial Museum. The portion of Cockerell's Building formerly occupied by the Woodwardian Museum has been vacated and put at the disposal of the University Library; and the well-known name is only perpetuated in a special portion of the exhibition galleries in the new building containing the founder's collection.

The entire collection of Wenlock fossils made by T. W. Fletcher, Esq., which is now in the Woodwardian Museum, affords unsurpassed facilities for studying the material on which a large number of species of trilobites were founded. Particularly is this the case with those of the genus Lichas, and a recent examination of the types and other specimens which Fletcher used in writing his paper “Observations on Dudley Trilobites” (Q.J.G.S., 1850, vol. vi, pp. 235–239, pls. xxvii and xxvii bis) has led me to make the following notes upon them. I have also had the privilege, through the kindness of Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, F.R.S., of examining the specimens in the British Museum (Nat. Hist.), Cromwell Road.

Since the publication of the joint paper by Mr. W. H. Hudleston and myself on “Fossils from the Hindu Khoosh,” in which the Devonian age of well-preserved fossils found in the limestone member of a series in Chitral was demonstrated, my attention has been called by Mr. T. H. Holland to the fact that the series in Chitral agrees very closely with the rocks known to the Geological Survey of India as the infra-Trias, and described, for the last time, in Hazara by Mr. C. S. Middlemiss.

The Chitral series consists of three principal formations:— (1) A lower bed of conglomerate with rounded to subangular pebbles, varying greatly in size up to 3¼ inches in diameter, lying in an indurated, fine-grained matrix of slaty grit or arenaceous mudstone. The pebbles consist of limestone, slates, sandstones, and quartzites, with rounded, white quartz-pebbles, which recall the ‘eggs’ of the Blaini conglomerate of the Simla area. (2) A middle band described by my son, who made a hurried visit to the place, as red sandstone; and (3) an upper bed of grey, dark-blue, and creamcoloured fossiliferous limestone.

In Hazara the system of rocks known to the Geological Survey as the infra-Trias, on account of its position unconformably below the Trias, consists in the same way of a lower conglomerate, a middle sandstone series, and an upper limestone formation. These rocks, originally referred to by Wynne and Waagen, were described in fuller detail by Middlemiss in 1896.

According to Middlemiss, the conglomerate is composed of sub-angular pebbles of slates and quartzites, usually of about the size of a cricket ball, but varying from mere pebbles to larger lumps, and set in a fine purple sandy clay or shale.

Last April Dr. Anton Friê, of Prague, applied to the Natural History Museum for the loan of a fossil Arachnid which he had seen during a short visit to London in the Summer of 1902, and wished to include in a descriptive monograph of Carboniferous Arachnida which he has now in preparation. Since the specimen is unique, it was unfortunately impossible to accede to the request. Dr. Smith Woodward, however, kindly suggested that I should examine the specimen and, if necessary, describe and figure it, so that perchance an account of it might yet be in time to find a place in the monograph above referred to. The specimen, imbedded in the two pieces of a split nodule of clay-ironstone from the Carboniferous measures at Coseley, near Dudley, belonged formerly to the collection of Mr. Henry Johnson. It bears the register number 1551, and is ticketed by Dr. H. Woodward “Eophrynus, sp. nov.” The dorsal surface is exposed, part of it adhering to one face of the matrix, part to the other.

1.—Description of the Specimen; its generic and specific features.

The carapace unfortunately is crushed, and nothing positive can be affirmed as to its structure save that it appears to have been slightly wider than long, with a shallow, postero-lateral constriction and a straight, transverse, posterior border. In the middle line behind, however, there is an acutely angular impression, obviously representing the median impression occupying the same position and presenting much the same form in Eophrynus prestvicii, H. Woodw. The crushed condition of the carapace suggests that its median area was axially elevated as in the last - mentioned species and in Kreischeria wiedei.

The recently erected Memorial to the late Professor Henry Alleyne Nicholson, F.R.S., of Aberdeen, raised by subscription among his friends, deserves a record in the pages of this journal, to which he was for many years a frequent contributor (see Obituary of Nicholson, GEOL. MAG., 1899, pp. 138–144, with a portrait, Plate IV).

Professor Charles Lapworth, LL.D., F.R.S., of the University of Birmingham; Mr. John E. Marr, M.A., F.R.S., St. John's College, Cambridge; Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., late of the British Museum (Nat. Hist.); and Professor J. Arthur Thomson, M. A., who succeeded Nicholson as Eegius Professor of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen, with very many others, decided to commemorate Nicholson's lifework by some simple yet permanent record; and after consultation with the University authorities it was decided that the memorial should take the form of a Tablet similar to that erected in Aberdeen to the memory of Macgillivray.

The preparation of a design was entrusted to Miss Alice B. Woodward, and the execution to the well-known artists in metal, Messrs. Omar Ramsden & Alwyn C. E. Carr, of Albert Studios, Albert Bridge Road, London, 8.W.

The Nicholson Memorial Tablet (which measures 3 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 11 inches) is executed in hand-beaten and repoussé brass, mounted upon a stout framing of oak, and is a good example of the effort now being made to improve the artistic quality of such work, and render it more worthy of its object than the ordinary hurried modern machine-produced metal-work.

The Charmouth district, situated in the south-west corner of Dorsetshire, consists of valleys in the Lias clays, separated by hills which are capped by Upper Cretaceous rocks, resting unconformably upon the Lias. Black Ven is the name of the cliff face bisecting one of these hills, which, lying between Charmouth and Lyme Regis, divides the valleys of the Char and the Lyme stream. of this cliff, the lower 350 feet consist of Lias clays and limestones.

The fossil shrimps or prawns briefly described in the preceding paper by Dr. H. Woodward occur in the ‘fish-clay’ of the Osborne Series at Chapelcorner Copse, Binstead House, Ryde House, and Sea View, Isle of Wight, and they were first discovered by me in these beds about the year 1876. Having regard to the fact that new species of fish, etc., have been recently obtained from the Osborne Beds, it would seem that these prawns are very probably also new to English strata.

Additional Points in Stratigraphy.

In my paper published in the Proceedings of the Dorset Field Club (vol. xxiii), I dwelt at some length on certain borehole sections made towards the northern base of Creechbarrow with a view to the discovery of Pipeclay. This course was adopted in the hope that a study of these sections might throw some light on the stratigraphical relations between the Creechbarrow Beds on the hilltop and the Pipeclays lower down, if indeed there are any stratigraphical relations beyond a mere jumble of irregular deposits whose precise orientation can never be disentangled. Whether this latter supposition is the true one or not, the exceptional character of the Creechbarrow Beds, as a local feature, remains the same, even although we cannot decide whether they go under, over, or into the Pipeclay series. Before attempting any further speculation as to the possible stratigraphy of the region I will call attention, at any rate, to its topography as shown in the accompanying figure.