I Have recently been examining a series of specimens of Silurian slates from Scotland, specially collected because of the very intense shearing they have undergone. These and the accompanying other rocks are all crushed and torn out in a most remarkable degree, and the microscope shows how severely their constituents have been acted upon mechanically. Yet the crystalline and mineralogical development is seen to be but very moderate indeed. The micaceous mineral is all in one plane, and transverse sections, in polarized light, show that it is a felted, wavy, and puckered mass of interwoven flakelets, with chloritic substance intimately diffused among it, and still more apparent in separate little streaks and lenticles. The small amount of quartz present is rolled out into long, thin lenticles also. But the micaceous mineral itself is not at all far advanced, either as to size of its flakes or the nature of the mineral. It is still an impure, rather deeply-coloured greenish-yellow substance; not any of it has arrived at the stage of muscovite, and dehydration shows, in a remarkable manner, how very considerable its impurity still is. In its original condition, the slate gives sections which present a very uniform appearance under the microscope. The colour is the same all over, and the only indication of the presence of bands of varying nature is found in a very slight increase, in some layers, of the coarseness of grain and of the number of quartz-lenticles, and in the diffusion of the chloritic substance. But after heating the specimen, the effects seen in the sections are most striking. There are now many bands of different colours, yellow, red, greenish-brown, and brown, presenting very strong contrasts, and showing that noticeable differences in chemical composition must have existed in different thin layers of the seemingly homogeneous slate. Not only the interwoven chlorite, but also the micaceous mineral, has taken on these tints in very decided degrees. It must have been unusually impure. It has lost, after heating, nearly all its action in polarized light.