Foraminifera

Abstract

THAT the time has come when an exhaustive work upon the classification of the Foraminifera fills a want which has grown yearly more persistent since Frederick Chapman's book₁ went out of-print, there can be no question. Dr. J. A. Cushman, whose persevering energy, amazing industry, and colossal output cannot but fill older students of the group with mingled admiration and alarm, has made a noteworthy effort to satisfy this want, but whether his revolutionary methods in the matter of classification, his resurrection of long abandoned, if ever adopted, nomenclature, and the overwhelming avalanche of new genera and species with which he and the workers in his “Laboratory of Foraminiferal Research” have swollen the already overburdened catalogue, will be received with equanimity by workers on the eastern side of the Atlantic, is open to doubt. In C. Davies Sherborn's colossal and epoch-marking “Index”, more than twenty thousand named species and varieties of Foraminifera are recorded with an accuracy which is final; these are extracted from the two thousand books and papers listed in his “Bibliography” of the group, and these two works, which must ever remain the fundamental ‘tools’ of all systematic researches upon the subject, were published respectively in 1888 and 1893–96. Since then many hundreds of papers great and small have been published, and the catalogue has necessarily been vastly extended by the establishment of new genera and several hundred new species. Now comes Dr. Cushman with a work in which the index Of genera alone cites more than seven hundred and fifty genera, of which less than one hundred and fifty may be regarded as synonyms. It causes the brain of the beginner to reel and his senses to gape.

Foraminifera: their Classification and Economic Use.

By Dr. Joseph A. Cushman. (Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research: Special Publication, No. 1.) Pp. iii + 401. (Sharon, Mass.: Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research; London: Thomas Murby and Co., 1928.) 22s. 6d. net.