Abstract
OCEANOGRAPHERS, who have long had good cause to be grateful to two well-known American institutions for their volume of "Collected Reprints" distributed each year, will welcome the recent institution of a comparable practice in France. It is manifestly impossible for individuals, and practicable only for a few major libraries, to maintain subscriptions and exchanges adequate to ensure the receipt of anything like all the important oceanographical papers which appear in the course of a year; a serious difficulty resides, of course, in the fact that so many organs of publication are concerned. This latter point is evident on scanning a new volume just received, Travaux du Laboratoire de Géologie Sous-Marine, vol. I (1947). This is produced by the École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1 Rue Victor-Cousin, Paris 5e, under the superintendence of the director, Jacques Bourcart. It contains fifteen papers ; five are by Dr. Bourcart himself, of which three are on the sediments of the French continental shelf, one on sedimentation in the English Channel, and the other on the geology of the 'lies Atlantides'. A paper by B. Brajnikov on the origin of the alluvial deposits of the Seine estuary is followed by a series of three by Prof. A. Cailleux, of which one discusses criteria for distinguishing between marine and nuviatile gravels. Dr. Claude Franeis-Bœuf, who is the author of five of the remaining papers, is well known for papers already published on the processes involved in estuarial sedimentation—a topic of great present-day importance. He discusses the physico-chemical factors of estuarial waters in connexion with the tropisms which affect eel migrations ; sedimentation in estuaries ; the oxygen content of fluvio-marine muds, and the production and consumption of oxygen in the topmost surface layer of the latter. The last paper, by V. Romanovsky, is on the elasticity of agar-agar gels. All the papers included are reprints from various publications ; the practice of issuing annual fascicules of reprints in special branches of study is very valuable to those directly interested.
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Submarine Geology : New French Annual. Nature 163, 315–316 (1949). https://doi.org/10.1038/163315d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/163315d0