Charles lapworth was born in 1842 at Faringdon, in Berkshire. Five years afterwards his parents removed to Lower Newton, one of the farms rented by his grandfather. He attended the country school at Buckland village, about two miles off, and the vicar of the parish, the Rev. Joseph Moore, finding him an omnivorous reader, generously lent him books from his own library and practically directed his early education. At the age of 15 he became a pupil teacher in the school, and in the year 1862 entered the Training College at Culham, near Oxford, passing out thence in 1864 with a first-class Government certificate. Of the posts as schoolmaster which were then offered him he selected that connected with the Episcopal Church at Galashiels, because it would give him a home and work in the fascinating borderland of Sir Walter Scott. This post he retained for eleven years, and was married in 1869 to the daughter of Mr. Walter Sanderson.

The present nomenclature of igneous rocks is generally acknowledged to be unsatisfactory, for not only is it without useful meaning, but it is also so unsystematic that it forms a severe tax upon the memory. The manifest and urgent need of reform, which these circumstances create, must be my excuse for presenting in a short note a suggestion likely to require much elaboration. A systematic nomenclature, I need hardly say, can only rest upon a systematic classification, so that the proposals I shall herewith make would have been fitly accompanied by an attempt at producing a classification of the kind. As I have found, however, that much expenditure of time and labour will be necessary to accomplish this task, I have decided upon publishing at once certain proposals with regard to nomenclature, which could be largely applied to classifications at present in use.

This “remarkable variety of granite” was briefly described by Mr. J. J. Harris Teall, F.E.S., in his “British Petrography” (1888), p. 316, and an interesting account was given in a footnote of the process by which the author was able to identify the topaz found in the rock.

In “The Geology of the Isle of Purbeck and Weymouth” (p. 152) I referred to some green sand which occurs next below the Chalk in Mupe Bay, Dorset, as somewhat resembling Chloritio Marl, but as being too thick for that bed. As it was followed by the Gault, I concluded that it belonged to the Upper Greensand. The section was subsequently visited by Mr. W. Hill, who collected from the sand in question Holaster subglobosus, var. altus, and Echinoconus castanea among other fossils, and inferred that it was Chloritic Marl. He considered that though it passed up inseusibly into the Chalk it was faulted against the Gault, but that there had been also considerable contemporaneous erosion of the Upper Greensand. In April of this year I revisited the section in company with Mr. Hill, and was fully satisfied as to the correctness of his views. The following account has been drawn up from our observations:—

The Lower Chalk becomes extremely impure in its lower part, and contains much glauconite; it thus graduates insensibly downwards into a gritty glauconitic sand. The sand contains a few phosphatic casts, more or less worn or corroded, scattered throughout it, but has a well-marked nodule-bed crowded with these casts at its base; other fossils with the shell preserved and not filled in with phosphate occur also throughout the whole bed.