A List of Writings relating to the Method of Least Squares, with Historical and Critical Notes. By MANSField MerRIMAN, Ph.D.

A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL treatise of great value to mathematicians, physicists, and engineers.

Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. By F. V. HAYDEN, U.S. Geologist in Charge. Washington: Darby and Duvall.

1877.

THIS pamphlet contains an interesting and useful sketch of the rise and extension of that continuous scientific exploring condition for which the Federal Government is deservedly reaping golden opinions. The Survey it appears took its origin in 1867, when Nebraska was admitted as a State of the Union, the unexpended balance of the sum appropriated for its legislative expenses as a territory being set apart by Congress for a Geological Survey of the new State. The utility of such an undertaking, executed in a spirit of thoroughness, having become evident to the Legislature (whose wisdom in this respect might be advantageously imitated in other countries), further sums of money were voted, and the Survey was gradually extended, not alone as to the country to be explored, but also as to the subjects included. Not alone the geology-using the term in its widest sense-but the ethnology, the natural history, the meteorology, and the agricultural resources of the territories are carefully studied and reported on. Men of proved eminence are appointed to the various departments, and they are allowed both time and appliances to carry out their task in a manner creditable to themselves and their country, and highly useful to men of Science throughout the civilised world.

Among the most valuable results of the Survey may be mentioned the observations glanced at in the following passage:"Accumulated experience has shown that the various evolutional tides of organic life have not advanced at the same rate in all parts of the world. Thus while we find that a certain grade of vertebrates, invertebrates, and plants are associated together in the strata of, and collectively characterise a certain geological period in, Europe, in America we find that the same grade of plant life was evidently reached much earlier, and the same grade of vertebrate life was continued much later.”

One of the features of this Survey has been the employment of a skilful photographer, Mr. W. H. Jackson, whose success in

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conveying the characteristics of rocks and mountains we have on a former occasion had the pleasure of pointing out. The value, or rather the necessity, of photography in scientific exploration is scarcely even yet fully understood by the public at large. We are justly told that "twenty years ago hardly more than caricatures existed, as a general rule, of the leading features of overland exploration. Mountains were represented with angles of 60 degrees inclination, covered with great glaciers, and modelled upon the type of any other than the Rocky Mountains; the angular lines of a sandstone mesa represented with all the peculiarities of volcanic upheaval or of massive granite."

The total number of negatives in the possession of the Survey amounts to nearly four thousand.

Bulletin of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories. Vol. iii., No. 4; Vol. iv., No. 1. Washington: Government Printing-Office.

THIS number is devoted to zoology, recent and fossil. The first paper, by Mr. S. H. Scudder, contains a description of certain fossil insects discovered in the Tertiary beds of White River, on the borders of Colorado and Utah. With the possible exception. of four specimens from the Miocene of North Greenland, they are the first insects found in the Tertiary strata of America. There are in the collection no Lepidoptera, nor has the author yet met with any fossil species of this order of American origin, and no Orthoptera. More than one-half the species are Diptera, thus showing that these creatures-whose absence would be one of the essential requisites of a "golden age "-must have existed from a very early date in the Western Hemisphere. There are three Hymenoptera, four Hemiptera, one Neuropterous insect, and nine Coleoptera. The relative proportion of insects of different orders found in various deposits is of course a document of the highest value as regards their origin. If we consider that the Diptera, from their fragility, are about the least likely insects to be preserved, it will, we think, be allowed that in the Tertiary times they must have been relatively more abundant than in the present day. Among the Coleoptera the absence of Buprestidæ is remarkable.

There is a description of two fossil Carabs found in the Interglacial deposits of Scarboro' Heights, Toronto; a catalogue of the insects collected by Dr. Uhler during the explorations of 1875, with notices of their localities, times of appearance, &c. There are also papers on Cambarus Couesi, a new crawfish from Dakota; on a carnivorous Dinosaurian from the Dakota beds of Colorado; a notice on the ichthyological fauna of the Green River Shales; and an account of the genus Erisichthe.

The first number in Vol. iv.gives the records of much good work. The first paper, "Notes on the Ornithology of the Lower Rio Grande of Texas," by G. B. Sennett, may give the general public an idea of the difficulties which naturalists have to encounter on their explorations. "While we were constantly on the alert for huge rattlesnakes, tarantulas, and centipedes, still more troublesome. enemies were with us continually in the shape of wood-ticks and red bugs, to say nothing of the fleas. The wood-ticks we could pick off or dig out, but the abominable red bugs, too small to be seen, work themselves through the clothes and into the skin, making one almost wild with incessant itching. We only obtained partial relief by giving ourselves from head to foot, before going to bed, a bath of ammonia, and a daily bath of kerosene oil before going into the brush.”

The author secured five hundred birds, one altogether new to Science; about a thousand eggs, many of them new or rare; a few mammals, all of which proved interesting; and quite a collection of insects.

Drs. Coues and Yarrow's "Notes on the Herpetology of Dakota and Montana" include a most valuable account of the rattlesnake, of which five species, belonging to the two closelyallied genera Crotalus and Caudisoma, infest the region in question. The authors do not believe in the alleged power of fascination possessed by this reptile, and consider that the use of the rattle is a problem still unsolved. "One thoroughly established fact concerning the rattle is that its practical operation is injurious to its possessor, by provoking attack from those who can cope with it successfully." There is no known specific for the poison of the rattlesnake, but its bite, unlike that of the cobra, is by no means invariably fatal.

Geological Survey of Victoria. No. 4. Report of Progress by the Secretary for Mines, with Reports on the Geology, Mineralogy, and Physical Structure of Various Parts of the Colony. By Messrs. MURRAY, KRAUSE, TAYLOR, HOWITT, NICHOLAS, McCoy, and NEWBERRY. Melbourne: Ferres. London: Trübner and Co.

IT is satisfactory to know that the exploration of Australiageological, palæontological, and mineralogical-is not standing still. Attention is mainly directed, not unnaturally, to the occurrence of gold-fields and auriferous quartz veins. Still the existence of other useful minerals and the occurrence of animal and vegetable remains are not overlooked. Prof. McCoy makes

the following interesting remark:-"As in South America the Geological period, just before the creation of man, had the gigantic Megatherium to pre-figure the little sloths of the present day amongst the characteristic edentate group of mammals of the fauna of the same country, so the little native "bears" (Phascolarctos) of Victoria in our day were preceded, at the same late Tertiary period, by equally huge animals of their same general marsupial type, as characteristic of the existing Australian fauna as the edentate is of that of South America. The Diprotodon of Australia, curiously enough, like the Megatherium of South American deposits, was obviously a feeder on the twigs and foliage of trees, like their diminutive representatives of modern times."

Among the fossils figured is Asterolepis ornata, which occurs, though rarely, in the Middle Devonian Limestones of the Buchan River, and is almost identical with specimens found in the Russian Old Red Sandstone. Upon the occurrence of this species Prof. McCoy remarks:-"The great ganoid armourplated fishes of the genus Asterolepis are amongst the most abundant and striking characteristics of the Devonian rocks of Russia, and it is certainly a most extraordinary circumstance to find them here in Australia in limestones of the same age, and accompanied by the corals and shells of the Plymouth and Eifel limestones of similar age, with which they are not known to occur in England or Germany, and which do not occur with them in the Russian beds."

As additional instances of the permanence of local type in Australia, both among plants and animals, may be cited the occurrence, in the Pliocene Tertiary argillaceous strata at Daylesford, of Eucalyptus Pluti, the foliage of which is in size and shape almost identical with that of the living Eucalyptus globulus. Relics of gigantic extinct kangaroos, Macropus Titan and M. Atlas, are found in the newer Pliocene Tertiary, 25 feet below the surface, at a place called Duck Ponds.

Several of the iron ores of Victoria have been analysed, and are considered valuable. Certain samples, from Lake Tyers and from Bonang, have been pronounced by an experienced English iron-master worth carriage from Melbourne into Shropshire. The reporter, however, thinks it doubtful whether even the best of the Victorian iron ores would, in their crude state, pay for export to England, owing to the expense of land-carriage to the sea-board.

The volume is illustrated with maps, diagrams, and plates, showing microscopical rock-sections, sections of strata, and views illustrative of the general character of the scenery.

Records of the Geological Survey of India, Vol. x., Parts 1, 2, 3. 1877.

THE Annual Report of the Survey for the year 1876 contains some judicious strictures upon men of science who wish to force upon facts an interpretation favourable to their pet theories. The foreign relations of the Gondwana system are becoming, it seems, a burning question. "Palæontologists come from cabinets in Europe with the fixed idea that the laws they have seen to work so well as between Bohemia and Bavaria, or from Durham to Dorsetshire, will apply equally between India and and Australia, or Europe, and the eager aim of their labours seems to be to tally off our Indian rock-groups as the representatives or equivalents of certain fossiliferous series in Europe, or elsewhere. From the beginning this paleontological fallacy has been the chief obstruction to our knowledge. When first the Gondwana fossils were taken, pure geology being in the ascendant, the fact that certain plant forms of the lower Gondwana rocks were somehow associated with beds having a carboniferous marine fauna in Australia was made the basis of a special pleading to show that the Damudas, their flora and their coal, were palæozoic. The materials have now come into the hands of a pure palæontologist. He has shown, I believe, conclusively that the Gondwana flora is wholly mesozoic, nailing its several phases to certain representative zones in Europe. But it so happens that on the confines of India, east and west, the upper Gondwana groups are associated with beds having a marine fauna, according to which these said groups have already been attached by palæontological experts to other standard groups in Europe. It is true that the study of this fauna was only partial, but the experts were very accomplished in their line, and their judgment was quite unprejudiced, so that it must carry great weight. Here then, again, is an opening for the procrustean method of research; and there are symptoms that it is to be duly applied, this time, to make the fauna conform to the flora. The expression palæontological contradiction,' which has been applied to this fact of association, exhibits the predicament in a very naive manner. The contradiction is certainly there, but only as a rebuke for those who can look upon it in that light. No theologian could be more impious in reducing the mysteries of existence to the compass of his narrow thoughts than are often scientific specialists in imposing crude conceptions upon the proceedings of Nature. Yet these ought to know better that truth is discovered, not invented."

Mr. W. T. Blanford reports on the Great Indian Desert, between Sind and Rajpootana, part of which at no remote date appears to have been an arm of the sea.

Dr. Feistmantel describes the occurrence of the cretaceous