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In the Comptes Rendus of the Paris Academy, Mr. Lowell gives the result of a series of spectrographic determinations of the rotation of Venus and Mars. For Venus, the speed of motion of a point on the equator was found to be' practically nil, the probable error of the observation only amounting to 0.008 kilometer per second, the result thus supporting the idea that Venus rotates in the same period as her revolution. For Mars the speed was found as 0.228, the computed value being 0.241. The probable error in the case of Mars was 0.036. The satisfactory result obtained for Mars lends support . to that for the larger and brighter planet. The recent discoveries of wonderful new types of extinct animals in the tertiary deposits of the Fayum Desert of Northeastern Africa, and their bearing on the origin of the modern African fauna, are discussed by Dr. C. W. Andrews in the Quarterly Review. The new evidence shows unmistakably that the Proboscidea (elephants and mastodons) and the Hyracoidea (the coney of Scripture and its relatives) were developed in Africa itself; but it does not appear to invalidate the long accepted theory that the bulk of the modern African is of northern origin. It might, however, have been added that, in view of the discovery of certain antelope and other remains in the later tertiaries of Africa, the migration may have been somewhat earlier than commonly believed. Probably, indeed, there have been several migrations of African types to the north and of European and Asiatic types into Africa. In this connection it may be mentioned that Dr. C. W. Andrews, the chief describer of the extinct Fayum fauna, has brought to notice in the November number of the Geological Magazine a remarkably fine shell of the giant ll\nd tortoise, Testudo ammon, of the Upper Eocene beds of the district in question. This appears to be the earliest of the big land tortoises, and may have been the ancestral type from which those of Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Mascarene Islands, together with the extinct Indian species, were derived. .The past year has been noteworthy for the amount of literature devoted to the members of the horse tribe, or Eguidm, writes R. Lydekker in Knowledge. One of the latest contributions to the subject is an article by Mr. R. T. Pocock, the superintendent of the London Zoological Gardens, on South African quaggas, published in the November number of the Annals and Magazine of Natural History. According to the author, we have to deplore the extermination not of one, but of several distinct forms of these animals; the quaggas of the older writers, of which two races are recognized, being distinct from those exhibited forty years ago in the Regent's Park and other.menageries. Without for a moment saying that the author may not be right in his view, it certainly does seem strange that the whole of the quagga-skins which have come ' down to us should differ fromthe animals described by the older zoologists. The Asiatic and African' wild asses form the subject of a paper by the above writer published in a recent issue of Novitates Zoologies, the organ of Mr. Walter Rothschild's zoological museum at Tring; an apparently new race of the onager from Central Asia, now:jJjjring"'in.tjie Duke of Bedford's park at Wo-burn'being described and figured. The description of one of the two races of the African wild ass is based on specimens killed in the Eastern Sudan by Mr. N. C. Rothschild, one of which is now mounted in the British (Natural History) Museum, while there is a second in the Edinburgh Museum, and a third in Mr. Rothschildf!;.own collection. -:As .the construction of the Suakin-Bifrber railway is'only ?oo likely to lead to the extermination of this race, these specimens are very precious.
