Our knowledge of the structure of the cuticle of Coal-measure plants is very meagre in comparison with the amount of information recently published as to the cuticular characters of Mesozoic genera. So far as I know, no detailed descriptions have been published of the cuticles of British Palæozoic plants. Professor Zeiller1 has described a few cuticles of French Carboniferous plants, and Dr. Huth2 recently gave an account of the cuticle of Mariopteris muricata, but very little has so far been attempted in this branch of research. The present preliminary account deals with material obtained by Mr. L. J. Wills from the Middle Coal-measures of the Denbighshire Coal-field near Chirk and from the Old Hill Marls (Etruria Marls ?) in the Upper Coal-measures of South Staffordshire. The cuticles are preserved as brown films in clayey shales, approaching fireclays in composition, none having yet been found in carbonaceous or sandy shales. It is hoped that this note will incite collectors to search for further specimens in this state of preservation.

The highest beds of the Carboniferous rocks of Wensleydale are found on the summit of Great Shunner Fell, which is situated on the watershed between Wensleydale and Swaledale, and forms the high ground to the west of the Buttertub Pass on the road between Hawes and Muker.

Although educated Europeans have never carried the art of ‘spooring’, or tracking, to the perfection with which it is employed by the Australian and African natives, it is possible for us by applying a little common sense and certain experience of the tracks of living beasts to the fossil footprints so commonly found in terrestrial deposits laid down under arid conditions to find out many features of the animals which made them.

Summary.—(1) The reptiles Gordonia, Geikia, and Elginia are shown to be slightly later than those of the Upper Permian Pariasaurus beds of Russia, or those of the equivalent Cisticephalus zone of South Africa. They therefore represent the extreme top of the Permian. (2) The remaining Elgin reptiles are Middle Triassic (? = Lettenkohle of Germany). (3) The Elgin footprints are widely distinct from Triassic forms and from those of the Lower Permian, while agreeing exactly with the group associated with the Magnesian Limestone of England. They therefore represent the extreme top of the Permian. (4) The discovery is recorded of one of the typical footprints in close proximity with the Permian reptile quarry. (5) The Permian rocks occupy the west of the ‘Triassic’ area, the true Trias the east. (6) It is suggested that the area was a landsurface during Permian and Triassic times.

The rocks of this series form an interrupted belt along the southern border of the Highlands from Stonehaven on the east to the island of Arran on the west, and they appear again on a more extensive scale in Ireland. In Scotland the series consists of cherts or jaspers and shales, sometimes associated with limestones and with some peculiar igneous rocks. The age of the series has been for years a matter of controversy. Many geologists have held that these rocks are of pre-Cambrian age, but Messrs. Peach & Horne in their volume on The Silurian Rocks of Britain (Mem. Geol. Surv., 1899) remarked on the close resemblance of the rocks of this belt to some of the Arenig rocks in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, and the belt has been marked on the Geological Survey maps as doubtfully Lower Silurian.

The zone of offaster pilula is probably exposed on the coast in West Sussex on the foreshore near Bognor, but the nearest cliff exposures to those of East Sussex are those of the Isle of Wight, at Culver Cliff and Scratchells Bay. In both of these the Chalk is so highly inclined that only a very small area of each bed can be reached; and the condition of the accessible surface is such as to make it most improbable that anything beyond the broad outlines of the subzone of abundant O. pilula, which is the key and pith of the zone of O. pilula, will be detected.