378 Book Reviews

but rather to its toppling over through 18oO. Regarding the pole positions obtained
from the Turkmenian work it is of interest that the north pole for the Plio-Pleisto-
cene has the co-ordinates 75 N, 122 W. This revives the opinion once held that a
polar displacement towards North America was necessary to explain the assymetry
of the Pleistocene glaciation. Similar effects should, but have not turned up in
work elsewhere, but this could be due to inadequate correlations and the limited
data.
The work in European Russia is notable chiefly for studies of the Permian
classical sections in the eastern Urals. Except for the highest levels of the Permian
(the Tartarian which could in part be Lower Triassic) the directions are all

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“reversed” as for Permian beds elsewhere in the world. The pole agrees very well
with that obtained from the western European Permian. The level of the return
to “normal” polarity in the Tartarian promises to be a useful world-wide datum.
A translation into English of this book will be published in 1960or early 1961
by the Australian National University.
E.I.

Introduction to Geophysical Prospecting

M. B. Dobrin
(2nd edition, 1960, 446 pp., McGraw-Hill, 745.)

This is the second edition of the book originally published in 1952. It is a

second edition in more than name: new sections have been added at the expense
of some of those in the first edition and the text with its very useful references has
been thoroughly revised to bring it up to date. The number of revisions illus-
trates the appreciable extent to which prospecting techniques have been modified
in the past decade. The basic methods are unchanged but there have been con-
siderable developments in both the instruments and the interpretation techniques.
Particularly in seismic work, these have coincidentally led to a better appreciation
of the effect of the recording process on the data quality.
Seismic methods occupy a predominant position in the industry at the present
day and the sequence of chapters in this edition has been revised to emphasize
this, with additional space being devoted to both reflection and refraction tech-
niques. The new material here includes magnetic tape recording, corrected record
sections, geophone patterns and recent interpretation methods. One particu-
larly interesting addition is a chapter on the geological interpretation of reflection
records with its discussion of geological/geophysical coordination. The author is
to be congratulated on avoiding the woolly talk which usually surrounds this topic
and on illustrating in practical terms why this coordination is required.
Developments in gravity and magnetic surveys have been less spectacular than
those in seismic surveys but the sections in interpretation have been extended and
the latest instrumental developments included. The chapters on radioactive and
electrical methods have also been enlarged although in the case of electrical methods
perhaps not sufficiently to satisfy the mining geophysicist. This extra material
has been incorporated at the expense of three chapters of the first edition: of these,
 Book Reviews 379
the only serious loss is that * dealing with well-logging methods although its
omission is justifiable in view of the tendency of well-logging to become an
independent geophysical field.
The short chapter on earthquake seismology and the structure of the Earth
has been retained; in spite of the author’s apologia for its presence, it seems some-
what out of place in this book. Whilst commercial geophysics owes a great debt
to earthquake seismology, one would hope that any geophysics student could be
left to acquire this background information elsewhere. The least satisfactory part
of the book is perhaps that dealing with seismic instruments. Although it includes
recent developments and has been largely rewritten, there are a number of minor
errors and rather misleading statements.

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In spite of these minor criticisms, this book, like its first edition, is very com-
prehensive, well-produced and very readable. It can be firmly recommended
to its intended readership of students and of those practising geophysicists who
require a quick reference to fields outside their own speciality.
A.T.D.