Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/144

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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

Lefèvre, André. Race and Language. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 424. $1.50.

Massachusetts. Third Annual Report of the Trustees of Public Reservations. Pp. 56.

Michigan Mining School, Houghton. Catalogue, 8892-'94. Pp. 215, with Maps.

National Editorial Association. Souvenir of the Banquet tendered to it by F. W. Harper.

New York: State Reformatory at Elmira. Eighteenth Year Book. Pp. 180.—University Regents' Bulletins. No. 27. Extension Teaching. Pp. 72.—No. 28. University Convocation. Pp. 275.—No. 29. Extension Schools. Pp. 84.

Nichols, Edward L. A Laboratory Manual of Physics and Applied Electricity. Vol. II. Macmillan & Co. Pp. 438, with Chart $3.25.

North Dakota Weather Service. First Annual Report. B. H. Bronson, Observer. Pp. 70.

Palmer, Walter K. Mechanical Drawing. Columbus, Ohio: Charles B. Palmer. Pp. 51.

Parker, John D. Historical Paper of the Western Scientific Associations. Pp. 8.

Planetary Publishing Company, Chicago. The Play of the Planets A Game, with Book. $1.

Powell, J. W., Director of the United States Geological Survey. Tenth and Eleventh Annual Reports of the Bureau of Ethnology. Pp. 832 and 553. Washington: Government Printing Office.

Richter, Eugene. Pictures of the Future. New York: Optimus Printing Company. Pp. 190. 50 cents.

Shinn, Millicent Wasburn. Notes on the Development of a Child. University of California Studies. Vol. I, Nos. 1 and 2. Berkeley. Pp. 178.

Smithsonian Institution. Annual Report of the Board of Regents to July, 1893. Washington. Pp. 763.

Storer, F. H., and Lindsay, W. B. An Elementary Manual of Chemistry. American Book Company. Pp. 453. $1.20.

Turner. J. B. The New American Church. Chicago: B. F. Underwood. Pp. 60. 25 cents.

Van Norden, Charles. The Psychic Factor. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 223. $1.25.



POPULAR MISCELLANY.

Geology at the Brooklyn Meetings.—The Geological Society of America held its sixth summer meeting in Brooklyn, N. Y., August 13th to 15th; and the forty-third annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was held in the same city, August 15th to 22d. The number of papers presented before the Geological Society was twenty-six, and exactly the same number also were read before Section E (Geology and Geography) of the association. This year a few distinctly geographical papers were presented in Section E, notably in contrast with several years preceding, which have had almost exclusively geological papers. One especially timely subject was the Geographic Development of China, Corea, and Japan, by Hon. Gardiner G. Hubbard, President of the National Geographic Society, Washington, D. C. On account of the importance and increase of work for both geology and geography, it is proposed that a special section of the association be devoted to each.

The vice-presidential address of Prof. Samuel Calvin, before Section E, on The Niobrara Chalk, called attention to the extensive beds of chalk in the middle division of the Cretaceous series of the upper Missouri River region. It has been generally taught in our geological text-books that no true chalk deposits exist in America; but explorations along the Missouri show that strata of chalk, ranging from sixty to ninety feet in thickness, extend from the mouth of the Niobrara to that of the Sioux River, on the west boundary of Iowa. The best outcrops are near Saint Helena, Nebraska. Microscopic examination reveals the same forms of foraminifera, coccoliths, and rhabdoliths which make up the chalk of England and portions of continental Europe. The close identity of conditions in these two widely separated regions was commented on as a fact of great scientific interest. At the same time with the deposition of the much thicker European chalk-beds, far away to the West, beyond the ninetieth meridian, and thus distant more than a quarter of the way around the globe, with an intervening abysmal ocean and a continental mass of land between these areas, there was another clear sea in which the same or very similar microscopic types of life were developed in incomprehensible profusion to make the chalk-beds of Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska.

Papers on the Archæan and Palæozoic rocks were presented by J. F. Kemp, C. H. Smyth, Jr., R. S. Tarr, W. P. Blake, E. 0. Hovey, N. H. Darton, Arthur Winslow, C. W. Hall and F. W. Sardeson, C. H. Gordon, C. S. Prosser, N. H. Winchell, and J. P. Smith. Several papers relating to the Mesozoic and Tertiary formations were by H. W. Fairbanks, J. P. Smith, W. H. Dall, and Arthur Hollick. Dr. Dall confirms the Miocene age of the brightly colored and highly inclined fossiliferous strata of Gay Head, at the west end of Martha's Vineyard. Above the Miocene beds, however, and unconformable both with them and the overlying glacial drift, is a fossiliferous horizon of Pliocene age.

The large share of attention which is now being given to the Quaternary era, compris-