The c. 15000 km2, c. 2 Ga Kunene complex of southern Angola and northern Namibia is one of the world's largest occurrences of anorthositic rocks, rivalled only perhaps by the Lac St Jean massif of the Grenville Province in Quebec. We report here the results of a detailed field and laboratory study of a 100 km2 area in the northern part of the complex. Coarse grained (av. 1–2 cm) anorthosite and leucotroctolite are the predominant rock types, although colour index varies between 0 and 50, averaging about 10. Ultramafic rocks are totally absent. Typical mineralogy is: plagioclase (An57–76) + olivine(Fo64–71) + orthopyroxene(En65–74) + clinopyroxene ± Fe—Ti oxides ± apatite. Textures are dominantly massive, although weak, impersistent, magmatic lamination with nearvertical dip and unsystematic strike is also present. Other magmatic features include plagioclase and orthopyroxene megacrysts, block structure, mortar texture, and anorthositic dykes. Metamorphic effects are minimal or absent. All of these attributes are similar to those found in typical massif-type anorthosites. Since comparable features are present over large areas elsewhere in the complex, we suggest that Kunene should be considered analogous to a large, composite, massif-type anorthositic intrusive complex, rather than to a large, single or composite mafic layered intrusion such as Bushveld, as has been previously suggested or assumed. This interpretation is supported by satellite imagery, which shows the outlines of several individual anorthositic plutons, one of which clearly encompasses our field area.

Through the courtesy of the Ministry of Information and of the military authorities in Naples, the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology, Cambridge, have received samples of the latest ejectamenta from Vesuvius—lava, probably from the neigbourhood of S. Sebastiano, and ashes and lapillae from Salerno.

The possibility of change in the position of the Earth's axis seems periodically to attract attention. This is happening now. Professor Haughton has written upon this subject, Sir William Thomson has alluded to it, while two important papers have been read upon it, one by Professor Twisden before the Geological Society, the other by Mr. George H. Darwin before the Royal Society. This article is an endeavour to exhibit to the general reader the assumptions with which they have started, and the results they have obtained.

Very few deposits containing organic remains have yielded more beautiful Fossil Crustacea than our London clay formation. In evidence of this, one. has only to turn to the beautiful series of plates which illustrate Professor Bell's Monograph, published by the Palæontographical Society (vol. x. 1857), illustrative of 15 genera and 19 species chiefly from the London area and the Isle of Sheppy.

Only a few years ago it was looked upon as an article of faith among geologists, that the whole globe was once in a melted incandescent state, and that the conditions of temperature now prevailing on the surface of the earth have been in process of time produced by the slow gradual cooling of the once fused and glowing mass. It then appeared so natural that, in consequence of the earth’s internal heat, a tropical climate should extend from pole to pole, that no special weight was attached to the evidences of this fact which geology was at that time able to produce. The Dane Giesecke’s and the English Scoresby’s specimens of fossil plants from the east and west coasts of Greenland, evidencing a warm climate there, attracted so little attention, that neither they, nor the fossil remains of Saurians found by the famous Arctic traveller Sir Edward Belcher in the American Polar Archipelago, could be found in the museums to which they had been confided.

The usually quiet city of Prague in Bohemia, with its population of 235,000 inhabitants, considerably more than half of whom are Czechs, has been deeply moved by the recent death of an old French exile, who for more than half a century had made his home there, and, having taken up the geology of the country around Prague for his study, had endeared himself to the people by learning their language and interesting them in his pursuits. After publishing at great cost his geological works, and amassing a vast collection of fossils, he has at his death bequeathed his Library and Collections (valued at £20,000) to the Prague Museum, together with funds for the completion of his scientific labours. “To-day,” writes Dr. Fritsch, “I have opened a ‘Barrande Fund’ with 1,000 florins, which I hope will soon reach to fl. 20,000; its object being to promote the study of the Silurian formations of Bohemia. We also wish to place a large slab inscribed with the name of ‘Barrande’ on the Silurian rocks in Kuchelbad, near the celebrated locality Wiskočilka, where he picked up his first fossil Orthoceras Bohemicum.”

The view is put forward that, as any subdivisions of an evolving plexus must be arbitrary, the existing binomial system of nomenclature should continue to be applied to morphological species in palaeontology, rather than be replaced by any other arbitrary system which could not be applied generally.