In a recent note Mr. J. Wilfrid Jackson, F.G.S., and the writer mentioned the occurrence at Cauldon, Staffordshire, at highly fossiliferous limestones, resembling those of the “Brachiopodbeds” of Castleton, Park Hill, Narrowdale, Thorpe Cloud, and other stations on the north-west, west, and south-west of the Staffordshire- Derbyshire limestone massif. It will perhaps be of interest to put on record the fauna of these beds, as far as it has yet been worked out, since the conditions under which they occur renders it highly improbable that any considerable amount of material will ever be available from them, and since they represent a phase which does not, so far as is known at present, occur to any extent in the more immediate neighbourhood of this station.

The earlist, and almost the only published, notice of the ‘Bridlington Crag’ is contained in a single page of London's ‘Magazine of Natural History’ for 1835, vol. viii. p. 355, entitled ‘A Short Account of an Interesting Deposit of Fossil Shells at Burlington Quay, by Mr. William Bean.’ Writing from Scarbro’ on March 30th, Mr. Bean states that ten days previously he had made a geological excursion to ‘Burlington Quay,’ when Mr. Walter Wilson, an intelligent lapidary of that place, directed his attention to a deposit of fragile and broken shells, which the late high tides had exposed on the north side of the harbour, and near the pleasure-ground called the Esplanade. On arriving at the spot, he found a heterogeneous mass, only a few yards long, and as many high, composed of sand, clay, marine shells, and pebbles of every description, chalk and flint being most abundant. The colour and appearance of this shelly bed resembled London Clay, but the fossils had the character of those found in the Crag formation. It would be necessary to collect a greater number of species than he had then obtained, and to exercise much caution before the geological position of the bed could be truly determined; but of this much he was certain, that the shells were coeval with, if not of higher antiquity than the Crag. More than half of them could not be referred to any existing species. The writer concluded by mentioning that he had already made a second visit to the place, in company with Dr. Murray, and reaped an abundant harvest.

The author emphasizes the distinction of the marine Paleocene fauna of India from that of Europe, and its resemblance to that of the West Indies (Antilles). He suggests a marine connection between West and East Indies across North Africa, south of the Mediterranean region, in basal Tertiary times, before the Americas had drifted far from Europe and Africa.

The opinion that fossil Radiolarians were entirely limited to Tertiary strata prevailed until a comparatively late period. Prof. Ernst Haeckel, in his monograph on the Radiolaria, published in 1862, says “that the Radiolarians made their appearance for the first time during the Tertiary period”; and Ehrenberg, as late as 1875, defined all the Polycystina-bearing rocks as Tertiary.

This species (under the generic name of Himantopterus)was first noticed by Mr J. W. Salter in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society for 1856 (vol. xii. p. 28, fig. 5); but only the penultimate segment and telson were then known.

In vol. xv. of the same Journal (1859), Mr, Salter described eight species of Eurypterus, from the Upper Ludlow Rocks and the Old Red Sandstone; but he did not refer to E. lanceolatus in that paper. Of these eight species of Eurypterus, E. pygmceus, from its smaller size, is the best preserved species. It occurs in the Downton Sandstone of Kington, in the Basement-beds of the Old Red Sandstone at the Ludlow Railway, and in the Upper Ludlow Rock of Ludford; and I have lately seen an entire specimen (in the cabinet of Mr. Jas. Powrie, F.G.S.), only one inch in length, from the Old Red Sandstone of Petterden in the Sidlaw Hills, Forfarshire.

In a short series of papers in this Magazine on How to work in the Archœan Rocks, I briefly set forth the principles of correlation which seemed to me available, and pointed out the precautions which should attend the application of each test. I discussed the evidence from (1) Organic remains; (2) Order of superposition; (3) Included fragments; and (4) Mineral composition. The lastnamed criterion has the widest application, and therefore it was necessary to define its scope with great care. I showed that its value largely depended upon accessory considerations. I insisted that rock-groups should be compared as a whole, that the degree of metamorphism was an important factor in the evidence, that a valuable auxiliary test was to be found in similarity of succession, that the proof of a Pre-Cambrian age enormously reduced the chances of error, and that, in some cases, the origin of the deposits was a useful aid in correlation. I recall attention to these points, because, at a recent debate in the Geological Society, some of my critics seemed to believe that I had been attempting to determine theage of formations by the comparison of a few hand-specimens. They omitted to take fully into account the subsidiary evidence which has been accumulated during the last decade. But even if we entirely ignore this mass of proof, it is surely of interest to point outlithological resemblances between rock-systems, even if we are not prepared to correlatethem. Twilight is better than absolute darkness. We may say that the Pebidian of Hicks is like the Lower Taconic of Emmons, without asserting the contemporaneity of the two groups; and then leave the lithological hint at the mercy of the evolutionary laws which will either destroy it or develop it into a theory.

The fossils which form the subject of this notice were obtained from the slates exposed in the excavations for the foundations of the “Pengelly” Lecture Hall, which was added to the Museum of the Torquay Natural History Society in 1894. They were collected by Mr. W. J. Else, the late Curator of the Museum, and were examined by the late Rev. G. F. Whidborne, who published some account of them in the Geological Magazine for 1901, p. 533.

When Mr. Whidborne's paper was published I was not specially interested in the details of the geological structure of Torquay, but since then I have paid much attention to these local details and have collected fossils from all existing exposures. I was consequently surprised to find on reference to the note published by Mr. Whidborne that he had regarded these fossils as a Lower Devonian assemblage, in spite of the fact that the Museum is in close contiguity to a tract of Middle Devonian Limestone, as shown on the map of the Geological Survey published in 1898. Moreover, he quoted a statement made by the late Mr. A. Somervail regarding the stratigraphical position of the slates which is entirely incorrect. It is not true that in ascending the Torwood valley from The Strand one passes over a descending series of rocks. The beds underlying The Strand are shaly slates, which dip northward under limestone, and the same slates run up the valley to and a little beyond the Museum; they are then succeeded by limestone which crosses the valley in a south-east direction, and about 100 yards higher up this is faulted against slates which are believed to be of Lower Devonian age.

The Mbalevuto sill intrudes sedimentary rocks on the SW flank of Tavua volcano, Viti Levu, Fiji. It appears to have been intruded at shallow depth in a semi-molten state. The sill is of essexitic composition and petrochemical evidence suggests that magmas forming the sill and lavas of the Tavua volcano are consanguineous.

The two Memoirs by Dr. Reynès, on the Cretaceous formation, which were noticed in the ninth number of the Geological Magazine, suggest two questions: how far subdivisions there proposed are applicable to the Cretaceous series of this country; and, next, as to the sufficiency of the ground on which the synchronism of the subdivisions of geological formations has been based. The subject of the second Memoir, ‘De l'Étage,’ involves considerations which might be well extended to the whole range of the geological series: indeed, it will hardly be profitable to make much progress with the past physical history of the earth until rules for determining geological horizons shall be established.

Although the Coalbrook-dale Coal-field has received a large share of the attention of geologists, the progress of mining operations reveals new facts from time to time, enabling us to explain away some of the difficulties which have beset earlier writers.

Since the date of my communication to the Geological Society on the sections at and in the neighbourhood of Twt Hill, I have more than once visited the district, and have spent much time in working over the specimens which I have collected. The exact relation of these conglomerates to the granitoid rock on which they rest is a matter of great importance as bearing on theoretical questions relating to metamorphic changes in stratified rocks— questions at which for the last three or four years I have lost no opportunity of working. I should therefore, in all probability, have recurred to the subject, even if my attention had not been directed to it by my friend Dr. Roberts' communication and criticism of the above paper. In the latter, it may be remembered that we assigned the Twt Hill conglomerate to the granitoid series.