THE appearance of a new part (No. 20) of Geological Literature added to the Geological Society's Library in 1913 will be welcomed by all who are actively engaged in geological work. In the interests of research it is to be hoped that the issue of the records for 1914 and subsequent years will not be long delayed, as this publication is of the greatest possible value, in fact one might almost say indispensable to all who desire to keep up with the current developments of their particular branch of the subject. Our thanks are due to the anonymous compiler of this part; only those who have had experience in bibliographical work can form any idea of the amount of time and trouble which its preparation must have involved.

For many years this portion of Egypt had remained a blank so far as its geological structure was concerned, and when the geological map of Egypt was issued by the Survey Department in 1910 this extensive area was deliberately left uncoloured. Efforts were made by the writer to interest the various parties which were mapping the topography of this region, but the fossils submitted by them only indicated the presence of beds of Upper Cretaceous age, including a facies identical with that developed in the Abu Roash hills near Cairo.

There appears to be a good deal of variation in the Lower Triassic succession of the different parts of Spitsbergen, even between Ice Fjord and Bell Sound, at which latter Gyronites nathorsti J. Böhm occurs in soft shales. The grey sandstones with a Lamellibranch fauna of Werfenian age from Axel Island, again, represent quite a different facies.

Graphic methods for the comparative study of numerous observations and facts have long been in use in the exact sciences. They have also been used to some extent in those branches of the descriptive sciences which deal more particularly with the problems of heredity and variation. The purpose of the present paper is to sketch in outline a way in which they may be used in the morphological and systematic study of fossils.

The following paper is an attempt to contribute to the solution of the problem of mountain building. It is here suggested that the folding of mountain ranges may be produced by the frictional drag of moving portions of the asthenosphere, and that these movements may be convective and result from its unequal heating by radio-active elements.

In a recent note Mr. J. Wilfrid Jackson, F.G.S., and the writer mentioned the occurrence at Cauldon, Staffordshire, at highly fossiliferous limestones, resembling those of the “Brachiopodbeds” of Castleton, Park Hill, Narrowdale, Thorpe Cloud, and other stations on the north-west, west, and south-west of the Staffordshire- Derbyshire limestone massif. It will perhaps be of interest to put on record the fauna of these beds, as far as it has yet been worked out, since the conditions under which they occur renders it highly improbable that any considerable amount of material will ever be available from them, and since they represent a phase which does not, so far as is known at present, occur to any extent in the more immediate neighbourhood of this station.

To the south of the Tsing-ling Range the above classification of the Sinian System no longer holds good. The Kisinling Limestone of western Hu-peh—a massive grey limestone grading downwards into a slaty limestone and slates—has yielded in its upper part gigantic Orthoceras, or the pagoda stone, and other Ordovician fossils; and is therefore regarded as equivalent to the upper and the middle part of the Sinian in north-east China. Unconformably underlying the Kisinling Limestone, a glacial deposit, the Nantou Tillite, was found by Willis and Blackwelder at Nan-tou, near the north-western entrance of the I-chang Gorge (about long. 111° 10′ E., lat. 30° 45′ N.). Mr. V. K. Ting has verbally informed the writer that this interesting deposit extends towards the south-west for a considerable distance. The occurrence of Asaphus and Trinucleus to the south of Ning-kiang (about long. 106° E., lat. 32° 45′ N.) makes it highly probable that, there, the upper Sinian is exposed among other folded Palæozoic strata.