In our introductory observations on the past and present aspects of Geology, in No. I. of this Magazine, we alluded to some special points much discussed now-a-days, such as ‘the origin of granite, the mode of formation of river-valleys, the excavation of lake-basins, the doctrine of homotaxis, and the origin of species.’ During our six-mothes‘ existence, we have witnessed some advance in geological knowledge along these lines of research, though we cannot say that granite is much less mysterious, river-valleys and lake-basins far better understood, or the contemparaneity and succession of species more easily explained, than heretofore. Yet geologists hold a taper in the darkness—a feeble light, showing the thick mist, and but little of the footway. Along this darksome path have gone the fitting letter of the ready writer, the weightier essay, the pamphlet, and the book,—all intended to be lights or signposts, and often fit and good. Indeed many have tried to illumine this track through the history of the past; and now where do we stand, and what can we discern around us?

Since the discovery of remains of air-breathing Vertebrates in the Coal-shales of Carluke,* several other evidences of a like grade of organization have been obtained from scotch Carboniferous deposits; but I had not, until the present year, seen any such fossils from English or Welsh formations of the same antiquity. The spencimens figured in Plate I., however, give evidence of the fact. They were discovered by John Edward Lee, Esq., F.G.S., in the much disturbed coal-beds at Llantrissent. Glamorganshire, which are referable to the lower part of the ‘Middle,’ if not to the upper part of the ‘Lower’ Coalmeasures.

A Post-Tertiary deposit, under the above denomination, lies upon the ‘Drift’ in the valley through which the River Nar takes its course towards its junction with the Ouse at Lynn; the united streams terminating in the Wash, an estuary bounded by the shores of Norflok and Lincolnshire.

Amongst a number of Crinoidal remains collected from the Mountain-limestone near Clitheroe, in Lancashire, I found one which differs from any I have before seen, and which is belived to be new. This is as yet unique, and is now in the British Museum.

There has been no lack, in the history of geological science, of suggestions as to how our knowledge may be advanced upon those obscure questions which yet ask for solution, both in the physical and palæontological departments of the study. Sometimes, by a surprising intellectual endeavour, we have been carried up to the moon, and asked to discover where its missing waters are, without which our useful satellite appears to be a sort of ‘house to let,’—the idea having got into the mind which originated the enquiry, that the earth had appropriated the said waters for the necessities of a supposed cataclysmal epoch. Also, we have been taken down, by speculative thinkers, at divers times, to depths beneath our terraqueous surface, and asked to pin some fundamental articles of faith upon schemes which show all existing there to be either fire, or water, or a zone of meterorite-mineral, or one of soild steel, or that, nothing existing there, the interior of our planet is a vacuum.