duct it than any other of the four views. It is creditable to the reason of the persons of other occupations consulted that this group is largest in each class. The hill which is now awaiting the attention of Congress is meddlesome and impracticable. As shown by Dr. Charles W. Dabney, Jr., Assistant Secretary of Agriculture, in a letter to Senator McMillan, it would seriously hamper the researches of the United States Bureau of Animal Industry, and it has been condemned, among other societies, by the American Medical Association, the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States, the National Academy of Sciences (which was founded to advise the Government on scientific matters), the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Association of American Physicians, the Medical Society of the District of Columbia, the Joint Commission of the Scientific Societies of Washington (and several of these societies separately), and the American Academy of Medicine. The greatest mischief of such a law is that it would be used as a precedent for similar laws in the several States, and, what the vivisection prohibitionists incautiously avow, as an "entering wedge" to bring in more drastic measures. America is in a fair way to make vivisection literature of its own.
Our present knowledge of the ice age affords an admirable example of reconstructing the past from the present as practiced by geologists. The process by which this reconstruction is effected, the facts relied upon, and the reasoning employed in it are given especial prominence in the recent volume on Ice Work, by Prof. T. G. Bonney[1] In order to show us what glaciers are and how they act, the author takes us first to the Alps. He points out the lines of débris and the occasional large bowlders carried by the frozen streams, and describes the moraines, giants' kettles, and other traces left by them. Going down the valleys below their present limits, he shows how deposits and marks of erosion testifying to their former greater extent can be identified. Such marks and deposits are found in other lands hundreds of miles from existing ice streams or any mountains that seem adequate to send forth glaciers of great extent. An ice sheet stretching across a continent must be assumed to account for these phenomena, and Prof. Bonney next shows us the ice fields of Greenland and the antarctic lands as evidence that this assumption is warranted. Leaving existing examples of glacial action, our author draws attention to various traces of the Glacial Epoch—lake basins, the parallel roads of Glenroy, eskers,etc. In dealing with phenomena whose meaning is not settled, he has first set forth the facts and then has given the leading rival interpretations of these data, pointing out in what particulars each seems to him strong and in what weak. Traces of ice work are numerous in the British Isles, and nearly one third of the volume is devoted to descriptions of them. In the northeast of England there are the Cromer till, contorted drift, and upper bowlder clays on the Norfolk coast, and similar deposits in Yorkshire, especially in the vicinity of Flamborough Head. In the northwest the Cumbrian Mountains and the adjacent lofty fells of the Pennine range obviously have been occupied by glaciers, and the mountainous part of North Wales affords evidence of similar import. The detached mountainous
- ↑ Ice Work, Present and Past. By T. G. Bonney. International Scientific Series. Volume 74. Pp. 295, 12mo. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Price, $1.50. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
