In 1928 the owner of the Tanjong Perak Rubber Estate, Dr. H. Trail Skae, noticed a white, porous, and friable rock near the Estate buildings and took specimens that were ultimately sent to the Geological Survey Department for report. The rock proved to be entirely new to British Malaya and of great interest, while in view of its complicated composition I suggested in a local publication that it should be called “Vitrite”. Dr. Skae registered the name “Vitrite” as a trade-mark for this rock, which has possible uses in commerce, but it has since been discovered that the word was used during the war by a Dutch firm for a particular kind of glass used in electrical work, so the name has to be abandoned, and the only attempt I have ever made to inflict a new name on petrologists has been signally defeated.

There are two specimens of Bellerophon in the collection which may be co-specific—one is fairly well preserved, though a little distorted, and the other is worn.

Syrabia, to use Krenkel's comprehensive term for the great region comprising Arabia, Syria, Palestine, and Sinai, has been the theatre of vast igneous activity from the Cretaceous to the present time. M. Blanckenhorn divides the igneous rocks of this region into two groups, according to age, as Cretaceous-Eocene and Neogene-Quaternary. The Cretaceous-Eocene group includes gabbro-serpentine-diabase intrusives and extrusives involved with, and restricted to, the Eurasian fold-mountain system in the northern part of the region, and also prevailingly basaltic eruptives occurring in the Syrabian plateau country.

If there is one branch of geology that was more strongly represented than another at the Fifteenth International Geological Congress in Pretoria, it is petrology. It is true that the petrologists did not present many papers, and that their official discussions were rather scamped, but it was on the excursions that they showed their real strength. I shall not soon forget the day when I conducted a party of fifty to Pilansberg. To see them jump from the buses at every stop; to hear fifty hammers ringing at once on my favourite nepheline rocks; to see the collecting bags swelling and the buses sinking lower and lower on their springs; few sights have ever given me keener pleasure. The Franspoort-Leeuwfontein excursion was also a purely petrological occasion, in which more than fifty took part; and then at the end of the Congress some thirty of us enjoyed ten days of concentrated petrology on the Bushveld excursion, under the inspiring leadership of A. L. Hall.