It has been for some time a matter of surprise to me that Dr. Holl, in his exhaustive memoir “On the Rocks of S. Devon and East Cornwall,”—after once raising the question “whether the limestones” (those of our present subject) “might or might not be the same as those of Ogwell, Ipplepen, and Dartington thrown over a broad anticlinal axis of the lower slates to the North-West,”1— should have ceased following out that line of thought to what appears to me the only possible issue, since he thoroughly recognized the existence of uniclinal structures in parts of the district.

Dr. Harvey B. Holl, F.G.S., has obtained many very perfect Silurian Entomostraca, and the late Lieutenant Henry Adrian Wyatt-Edgell got some good specimens from the Border Counties; and indeed Dr. Holl made an extensive and valuable collection from the limestones and shales of the neighbourhood of Malvern; nor has his collection been fully described and illustrated as yet, although several selected forms have been published in the “Annals of Natural History,” for December, 1865, and March, 1869. The remarkably rich collection of Silurian Entomostraca, however, brought together by Mr. J. Smith, of Kilwinning, contains some of the finest specimens yet seen; and the following notes on the places where they were obtained, and a list of the species (although provisional only, and not fully worked out), must be of interest, and probably of some practical value both to the geologists of Shropshire and to palæontologists in general.—T. R. Jones.

In England the Great Oolite of Minchinhampton contains the greater number of species belonging to this peculiar group of Haliotidœ. Morris and Lycett (Great Oolite Mollusca, p. 80) give a full and interesting diagnosis of the genus, which has oniy one representative in the Corallian beds of Yorkshire. D'Orbigny figures half a dozen species of Troehotoma from the Corallian of France, and Buvignier gives three from the Coral Rag of the Meuse. None are quoted by Be Loriol from the Séquanien of Boulogne.

In the Revue Scientifique for the 13th of September, 1879, Professor Carl Vogt published a remarkable article on the Archæopteryx. This Memoir being in a periodical that would not come under the notice of all readers in this country, an excellent translation of the paper was published in the Ibis. It is difficult, if not indeed somewhat unhandsome, to criticize Carl Vogt's contribution; seeing that it makes known the famous second skeleton of Archæopteryx, which had long evaded all efforts to learn its characters. The present writer followed it from Solenhofen, in its migrations over Germany, only to find it guarded like a sacred mystery in the house of Otto Volger, in Frankfort. But while very difficult, from not having seen the specimen, for me to speak with any confidence on points of the anatomy of Archaopteryx in which Carl Vogt's conclusions may be open to discussion, it is much easier, and, indeed, almost a pleasant duty, to differ from him emphatically in the philosophical conclusions drawn from his study of the slab. And I here offer a few remarks, since the like have not been volunteered from any one more competent to speak on the subject, concerning reasons why naturalists should at least hold their judgment in suspense before adopting some of the learned Professor's new conclusions, and in the hope of elucidating the true nature of this singular fossil.

The Palæozoic rocks of North Devon and West Somerset, presenting so complete a change in stratigraphical sequence and læontological and lithological characters from those forming the Coal-basins of Somerset and South Wales and their environs, have long attracted the attention of geologists. The bibliography of the subject, which has since attained such formidable dimensions andembraces so many stars in the geological firmament, had been swelled by the contributions of early theorists; and ere the term Grauwacke had been obliterated from our text-books, the general succession of the rocks had been so admirably sketched by De la Beche in his Report that, although too little quoted as an authority on the stratigraphy of the subject, prevalent opinion has now endorsed the correctness of the succession given by him ; and that succession, having been endowed with a recognized nomenclature by subsequent observers, now forms the basis for the discussion of a wider correlation tending almost to sweep away the distinguishing epithets which had been locally applied to its divisions.

The district to which the following notes refer is that which lies between Bagshot, Woking, Aldershot, Farnborough and Ascot. It consists mainly of heath-land, and seems but little known to geologists; in fact, the only authority for the beds included in this area is Professor Prestwich, who, in his paper on the Bagshot Beds [Q.J.G.S. vol. iii. (1847), p. 278], has supplied all the information about the district that is at present known. He divided the beds into an Upper Sandy series, a Middle Clayey series, and a Lower Sandy series. The Middle series he grouped with the Braeklesbantts of the Hampshire basin. The Upper he placed between the Bracklesham and Barton ; our present object is to show that it is more nearly related to the latter.

The Oolitic Polyzoa have been very little studied in this country. They are badly represented in our museums, and no systematic account of them has been given by any English writer. Their remains, however, are both abundant and often well-preserved in the Pea-grit beds of the Inferior Oolite near Cheltenham, and in the Forest-marble beds near Bath. Some Inferior Oolite beds near Metz, and the Forest-marble beds near Caen in Normandy, are still more prolific, and the produce of these several beds has furnished a very full illustration of the more prevalent forms of this class which lived in the Oolitic seas.

In the May Number of the GeologicalMagazine, Mr. Milne Home expresses anew his doubts about our conclusions on the glaciation of Shetland, laying special emphasis on the discordance between the statements of Mr. C. W. Peach and ourselves. He also cites Dr. Hibbert and Mr. Russell as to the position of certain boulders which, he considers, are at variance with our conclusions. In his recent criticisms, Mr. Milne Home still displays a curious misapprehension of many of the facts bearing on this question; besides he has committed a serious error in making allowance for the magnetic variation, on the strength of which he tries to establish a discordance between the trend of the ice-markings as given by Mr. C. W. Peach and ourselves, in Unst and the Outskerries of Whalsay.

In his Report for 1880, Prof. John Collett, Ph.D., State Geologist of Indiana, says:—Of the thirty individual specimens of the remains of the Mastodon (Mastodon giganteus) found in this State, in almost every case a very considerable part of the skeleton of each animal proved to be in a greater or less condition of decay. The remains have always been discovered in marshes, ponds, or other miry places, indicating, at once, the cause of the death of the animal and the reason of the preservation of the bones from decay.

“It is often said by vein-miners who have worked at great depths, that the jointed structure of rocks fades away and disappears in the deeper parts of the mines. This, however, is probably a case of the rule ‘de non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est ratio.’ All the joints near the surface are more or less acted on by the weather. The deeper-seated rocks may be just as much traversed by joints, but they are merely mathematical planes of division, the faces of the blocks adhering as closely as if they did not exist till the weather makes them apparent, or some force tears the blocks asunder.”

The Blackband Ironstone, at present extensively wrought at Borough Lee, Dryden Vale, about 5½ miles to the south-east of Edinburgh, is a member of the Middle Division of the Carboniferous Limestone Series. It abounds in fish remains, most of them unfortunately in a fragmentary and scattered condition, nevertheless many of these are clearly new to science. Such of these new forms as are most distinctly marked I propose to notice in the present communication ; the list will, however, doubtless be considerably extended by additional patient research, and we may also hope, that some further light will be thrown on the fishes, to which some of these fragments belonged.

Introduction.—A few miles north-west of Flambro Head the Chalk, after grandly edging the sea with sheer cliffs of over 400 feet, recedes inland; its steep high scarp making at first an angle of about 20° with the coast.

In Mr. Geikie's admirable work on “Prehistoric Europe,” in the chapter “On British Post-Glacial and Recent Deposits,” he alludes more than once in very flattering terms to my share in elucidating Cornish Post-Tertiary Geology, at the same time, however, questioning certain conclusions attributed to me with reference to the general correlation of the Forest-beds in stream-sections, i.e. those resting on the tin ground, with the Forests “exposed upon the present foreshore.”

In the pages of the Geol. Mag., about a year ago, I called attention to the rapid growth of our knowledge of the sequence and fossils of the Lower Palæozoic Rocks of Sweden, through the brilliant discoveries of the officers of the Swedish Geological Survey; and pointed out what appeared to myself to be their special bearing upon certain controverted points in British Geology. During the past year the additional results obtained by the same group of earnest and unprejudiced observers are so important in themselves, and have been worked out with such care and elaboration, that we have now a tolerably complete view of the entire Lower Palaeozoic Succession in the Scandinavian Peninsula, and are, for the first time, in a position to attempt the detailed correlation of its recognized rock groups with their representatives in Britain.

In the February Number of the Geological Magazine, there is an article by Messrs. B. N. Peach and J. Home, answering the doubts expressed by me regarding the soundness of their views on this subject.

Professor M'Coy, in his “British Palæzoic Fossils” (1854), speaks of transverse diaphragms being present at the base or proximal termination of the calycles (hydrothecæ) of certain graptolites, dividing the calycles from the common canal or perisarc. No further allusion appears to have been made to the presence of any diaphragms or septa until in 1868 the writer mentioned (Journ. Quek. Micros. Club, vol. i.) having observed “an impressed line between the hydrothecæ and the periderm” (perisarc), which was compared with that “at the base of the hydrothecæ in the sertulariadæ.” More recently Professor Allman (Monogr. Tubularian Hydroids, 1872), not admitting the presence of any septum or constriction, has compared the calycles of the Ehabdophora to the nematophores of the Plumularidaa.

The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans far from the continental masses of land are studded with islands, which from their being solely volcanic and of an age going back no further than the Tertiary period, are considered to lend great support to the hypothesis of the permanence of the great oceans and continents. Those who hold these views question the right of New Zealand to be considered a truly oceanic island, though on what grounds has never been quite intelligible to me. Waiving this objection for the purpose of argumeat, I propose to discuss the bearings of the facts, as formulated by those who believe in the “approximate” immutability of land and sea.

Cranial structure typically palæoniscoid, with wide gape and oblique suspensorium; teeth conical, sharp, incurved, of different sizes, larger alternating with smaller. Fins palmæoniscoid, fulcrated; dorsal nearly opposite the interval between the ventrals and the anal; caudal powerfully heterocercal, deeply cleft, inequilobate. Body-scales thin, rounded, but seldom symmetrically so, deeply imbricating; their external free or ganoid areæ distinctly marked off, and sculptured with closely set ridges which are apparently tubular internally. Scales of the caudal body-prolongation of the usual pakæoniscoid contour.

In a previous paper I urged that the conclusions there arrived at necessitated certain corollaries which are not universally accepted, and to which I hoped to call attention in the future. One of these I now venture to shortly discuss.