Quaternary of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula

329 nology in relation to continental and marine basins". A minority of the papers is dedicated to pollen morphology and is only indirectly related to the theme. The articles show a great diversity in stratigraphical as well as geographical spreading. Acritarchs of Precambrian age of Rumania (Olaru et al.) and also from Libya (Massa et al.) are described. Other authors present papers on pollen and spores from the Triassic (Duringer et al.), of West Germany and France, Tertiary of Africa (Oliver-Pierre, et al.) and Europe (Mercier et al.). Also a few from the Early Quaternary in France (Clet-Pellerin et al.) and Holocene of Africa (Lezine et al.). All articles are well presented and documented with maps, diagrams and illustrations. The plates giving micrographs of pollen, spores, acritarchs and dinoflagellates are of good quality and give the information necessary to interpret the text. The majority of the articles report about the subjects dealt with in frenchspeaking centres (not all from France!) and gives good information about the standard and intensity of scientific work in the French laboratories. At symposia like the biannual APLF a mixture of important and less interesting papers are presented and it is a good habit to select a number of the best ones for publication. Palynologists interested in the palynological correlation of marine and terrestrial deposits will find useful information in the present book. The only disadvantage may be, that all papers are in French, a language not all scientists handle with ease. The separate articles, however, are provided with an English summary. w. PUNT (Utrecht)

Quaternary of South America and the Antarctic Peninsula. Jorge Rabassa (Editor). Balkema, Rotterdam, 1984, 221pp., DFL. 55.00 (hardback). This volume contains 11 papers on varied aspects of the Quaternary (and ary) of South America. They in fact stratigraphically from a paper dealing

quite Tertirange exclu-

sively with Miocene megafaunas (Pascual) to a paper dealing with climatic variation in historical time (Dougherty and Calandra). The subject matter ranges through megafaunas, climatic changes, stratigraphy, palynology, and the effect of human settlement. All papers are in English, and most have a Spanish summary. I found the lack of an editorial statement a problem, since there appears to be little in the way of general theme among the papers. Some are quite specific, e.g. Casamiquela's taxonomic consideration of the Pleistocene giant deer, whereas other papers are in the more general review area. As a researcher with an interest in South America, I found several papers to be well written and illuminating about their particular subjects. In particular, the papers by Fernandez and Romero, and Heusser and Wingenroth on Argentinian palynology and Quaternary environments were well written and informative and the papers by Pascual on Tertiary megafaunal extinctions and Borrero on Pleistocene megafaunal extinctions were well argued. Indeed the paper by Fernandez and Romero was, in my view, the best in the volume in terms of presenting a new and complete piece of research. The paper is well illustrated, and a good attempt has been made at reconstructing past changes in the vegetation of the depositional site. However, I was left with the view that this volume has not been well planned. There is not a strong central theme, and the quality of papers varies considerably. As a final point, the illustrations varied from adequate to unusable. In some instances the markings on figures have been left in Spanish, whereas in other instances the combination of artwork and reproduction is so poor that it is impossible to read labels on maps and figures. ROBERT S. HILL (Hobart, Tasmania)

Evolutionary Cladistics of Marattialean Ferns. Christopher R. Hill and Josephine M. Camus. Bulletin of the British Museum (Natural