Some years ago my friend Mr. Robert Damon, F.G.S., of Wey-mouth, visited the Cretaceous deposits of the Lebanon, and when at that place he was so fortunate as to make the acquaintance of the Rev. E. R. Lewis, M.A., F.G.S., Professor in the Syrian Protestant College, Beirût, Syria.

In the volume of the Palæontographical Society for 1883, I conclude the series of supplements to my work on British fossil Brachiopoda. Additional supplements will, no doubt, be called for every now and then. As our rocks continue to be searched, new forms will turn up, and specimens will be procured that will enable palæontologists to complete the history and illustration of a certain number of those I have been compelled to leave insufficiently made out, described and illustrated.

Another series of beds, comprising those which are raised a considerable height above the sea, contain a congeries of mixed shells, often broken, and clearly, as we shall show presently, not in sitû; sometimes the shells are imbedded in sand and sometimes in clay. They contain generally a larger proportion of species, and belong to a more temperate condition of things. The fact that Arctic shells are found in these higher beds is undoubted; but, as I contend, the meaning of this is very different to what is often supposed,—the proportion of purely Arctic shells being by no means large, and under any circumstances the mollusca clearly pointing to a condition of things very different indeed to that which must have existed when the great boulder heaps of Smaland and Finland, which I have travelled across for scores of miles with amazement, were being fashioned,—when our azoic Boulder-clays were being manufactured, and when the mollusca which prevail in high latitudes were driven far to the south, to the Mediterranean and elsewhere, where a few of their descendants are still found in very deep water and sporadically.

[C1. 41], Sedgwick Collection, from near the top of Bwlch Mawr, is a rock of greenish-grey colour, with rather fewer felspars than the last. In the microscope the ground is seen to be largely occupied by squarish crystals of felspar, between which is some crypto-crystal-line matter. The larger felspars seem all plagioclase, but they are all much decomposed, some of the smaller ones are perhaps ortho-clase. There is no pyroxenic mineral preserved; calcite aggregations result, and also viridite extinguishing in no position. There are many minute quartz grains in the ground, which have the appearance of being secondary. Apatite is abundant; there are also black and brown crystals of iron oxides (ilmenite). A few crystals of epidote have been formed. No hornblende is to be found, and amorphous matter in the ground is uncertain, yet the rock may most conveniently be placed among the porphyrites. It has not, however, the andesitic structure of the Carn Boduan rock. The dark colour would be due to the chloritic matter and iron oxide scattered through the ground.

My remarks will have to be limited to Norfolk; because personally I know very little of the Red Chalk of Yorkshire, and nothing of that of Lincolnshire. Of course the subject would be better treated as a whole; but Norfolk geologists will forgive me for not waiting until that time (perhaps never to come) when I may know all the English Red Chalk. Perfection may be devoutly prayed for; but to wait for it would be to do nothing.

In the Geological Magazine, Dec. II. Vol. IX. November, 1882, my esteemed friend, Mr. W. Keeping, describes (pp. 485–491) some markings from the Silurian beds of Central Wales, which he considers to be fossil plants. The description of those markings, however, so far from supporting the correctness of Mr. Keeping's views, seem, on the contrary, to put it quite beyond doubt that the objects referred to are only trails and burrows of Annelids. It is indeed most surprising that Mr. Keeping, although referring to my paper on trails of different animals, etc., seems to have taken no notice whatever of the statements which are there brought forward as to the mode of occurrence and structure of the worm trails. For if this had been done, I think that the objects referred to would never have been described as fossil plants.