The most interesting series of specimens in this collection comes from Desolation Valley glacier, on the southern side of the Canadian Pacific Railway, and east of the watershed. These are: (1) A roughly pentagonal slab, about 9½″ by 7″ and from ¾″ to 1″ thick, of a rather fine-grained quartzite, with some minute glittering crystals, but giving little or no effervescence with cold HCl. The surface is crowded with wavy cylinders, generally slightly flattened, varying in diameter from about ·55″ to ·15″ (but commonly about ·55″).

Ocean Island, which is also known as Banaba or Paanopa, lies in the Pacific west of the Gilbert group, in lat. 0°52′S., long. 169° 35′ E. Our knowledge of it is but scanty; Darwin briefly mentioned it, and it is not the same Ocean Island as Dana described, for the latter lies in lat. 28°25′ N. and long. 178° 25′ W. It may be therefore of some interest to record a few notes on a small collection of specimens of phosphatic and coral rocks made on it by Capt. R. Tupper, R.N., of H.M.S. “Pylades,” who hoisted the British flag there in the year 1900. I am also indebted to him for a description of the island, and to the Pacific Islands Company, Ltd., for kindly furnishing me with further particulars of its physical features and analyses of the phosphatic rocks.

Among a large number of Canadian fossils sent to me by Col. C. C. Grant, of Hamilton, Ontario, for transmission to the British Museam (Natural History Branch), there were three particular specimens of fossiliferous limestone worthy of careful examination. These came from a glacial drift at Hamilton, known as ‘Bala Drift.’ There being no real ‘Bala’ strata in Canada, the appellation of ‘Bala Drift’ at Hamilton applies to a glacial drift containing fossils more or less allied to those of Bala, most probably to the Trenton Limestone, a Lower Silarian (or Ordovician) formation.

I am a stranger in the field of speculation, and am quite unacquainted with the intricacies of its authorized boundaries. It is therefore with some hesitation, lest I should tread upon forbidden ground, that I venture to offer a suggestion on one point in Professor Sollas's paper on “The Figure of the Earth.”

It has long been observed that mountain ranges and chains of islands (which, indeed, are only mountain ranges partially submerged) are generally curvilinear in form, but Professor Sollas is, I believe, the first to show clearly that the curve often coincides almost exactly with an arc of a circle. Such a mountain chain is frequently defined along its convex margin by a great reversed fault over which the mountain mass has slid forward; and in these cases, at least, we may safely adopt Suess's conception, and look upon the chain as the crumpled edge of a ‘scale’ of the earth's crust which has been pushed forward over the part in front of it. The surface along which the movement has taken place is called a thrustplane. If this surface really is a plane, then the edge of the ‘scale’, that is the mountain chain itself, must necessarily be circular in form; for if any plane cuts a sphere, in any position whatever, the outcrop of the plane on the surface of the sphere will always be a circle. There can be no deviation from the circular form unless the ‘sphere’ is not truly spherical, or the ‘thrust-plane’ is not a true plane.

In the recently published volume of the Memoirs of the Geo-logical Survey of Scotland, “The Geology of East Fife,” by Sir Archibald Geikie, it is argued that since the time when the 100 feet terrace was under the level of the sea there has been no depression of the land in the Firth of Tay, only “a continuous chronicle of gradual, if intermittent, uprise” (p. 321); also that “no trace has survived of any late deposit overlying the peat, so that we cannot be absolutely sure of the position which this sheet of vegetable matter would occupy if all the Post-tertiary deposits of the district could be grouped in chronological order ” (p. 318).

In the face of this statement by such a high authority it seems to be very desirable that the details of a section in post-Glacial beds, exposed in digging the foundations of the new Post Office in Dundee, should be recorded in the pages of the Geological Magazine.