The second volume of Dr. Robert Brown's admirably and yet
popularly written treatise, The Earth and its Story (Cassell and Co.), is published. It is, in its way, the historical romance of geology,—or perhaps, when one looks to the illustrations in it, which exhibit the struggle during the ages which ended in the Survival of the Fittest, it would be more accurate to say, the evolutionary melodrama of history. Starting with a lucid account of "Rock-Wasting and Rock-Making," Dr. Brown pro- ceeds to geological formations and the fossils they contain. Then
we have " Readings from the Rocks "—the Palaeozoic, Mesozoic, &c., involving in their turn dissertations on such different systems as the Cambrian, Silurian, Permian, Triassic, Cretacean, and Miocene. Having finished with the Periods, Dr. Brown pro- ceeds to consider the geographical distribution of living beings, the agents concerned in the dispersal of plants, and the distribu- tion of plants in zones and botanical regions, concluding with the origin of the floras of different regions. Dr. Brown lightens up his narrative—for his book is largely a narrative—with numerous, though not too numerous, good stories, such as the suggestion of the Scotch quarryman to David Livingstone, that when " God made the rocks, He made the fossils at the same time." He also writes with a complete and easy command of his subject. The illustrations with which this book freely abounds, are worthy of the letterpress.
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