In the year 1888 I published a short paper in the pages of the Geological Magazine and in “Nature,” in which I gave a brief account of the discovery of the fauna of the Olenellus (or Lower Cambrian) zone in the Comley or Hollybush Sandstone of Shropshire. Since that date great advances have been made in our knowledge of the Olenellus fauna of other areas, and the Olenellus zone has now generally attained an established rank and systematic position in the Geological Record as the basal zone of the Cambrian system.

During the last three years I have at various times collected and studied rocks from the Lake District. Some of them are, I think, of sufficient interest to render them worth describing. It is my opinion that a great deal of very interesting petrological work still remains to be done among these rocks, and that when they are more studied in detail they will be found to present more diversity of type than is usually supposed.

I will first note the occurrence of a variety of rock not previously recorded in this district. It is a quartz-andesite, or dacite. It is exposed on the ridge between Greenburn and Wytheburn, not very far from Dunmail Raise, and near to a new wire-fence which bounds, I believe, the property of the Manchester Waterworks. It is a dark-coloured rock, on a newly-fractured surface of which are seen numerous light spots of porphyritic felspars, and some of calcite, with many grains of quartz, some of good size. It was the grains of quartz which instantly attracted my attention to this rock when a bit was chipped off it in passing the exposed crag.

Several species of Vertebrata are now known to be common to the Upper Lias of the neighbourhood of Whitby, Yorkshire, and the corresponding formation so widely developed in parts of Würtemberg and Bavaria. The recent discovery of another link between the two faunas in question thus seems to be worthy of placing on record. Moreover, the latest comparisons render it possible to assign to the fossil under consideration a more precise specific diagnosis than has hitherto been published; and the announcement of the discovery may lead to the recognition of other specimens besides those in the British Museum, with which alone as yet the present writer is acquainted.

The extinct genus of Chelydroid Chelonians to which M. Louis Dollo gave the name of Pseudotrionyx, has already been recorded from the London Clay of Sheppey, by Messrs. Lydekker and Boulenger. It is somewhat remarkable, however, that until the recent acquisition by the British Museum of the collection of Mr. J. B. Ogle, no certain evidence had been observed of the occurrence of the genus in the Bracklesham Beds—the English equivalent of the Bruxellian Series which yielded the Belgian Pseudotrionyx Delheidi.

In the year 1865 portions of the upper and lower jaws of a large extinct fish that had been found imbedded in the Globigerina Limestone of Malta were submitted by Dr. Leith Adams to Professor Owen for identification. Adams had considered them as being the remains of a crocodilian; but in a paper that appeared in the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE for April, 1865, Owen pronounced them to be the remains of a large extinct fish that belonged to “the cycloid order, and having sauroid dentition,” and he proposed that “this fine addition to Miocene Tertiary fishes” should be known by the name of Stereodon Melitensis.

A portion of the bony skeleton of a fish of the same species was also discovered in the same locality; but as it was not sent with the other specimens, it has been neither figured nor described.