The Carboniferous rocks of Shropshire possess several peculiar features; and no member of the series shows these in a greater degree than the Millstone-grit, as seen on Sweeney Mountain, near Oswestry. Before discussing these features, it will not be amiss to detail briefly the character of this rock in other localities. It varies considerably in different places. For instance, in the Forest of Dean, it is a hard intractable rock. Such it is also in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, where it is often seen in place under the Coal-measures, or in boulders on the hillsides. Varteg Hill, near Pontypool, is a most characteristic spot for it; that hillside being covered with masses of grit, of all sizes and shapes. These masses arenot unfrequently wholly made up of water-worn quartz-pebbles, occasionally as large as a hen's egg, in a cement of sand and decomposed felspar. And although hundreds of houses, with their garden-walls, have been built of them, yet considerable areas of these boulders remain. Very large blocks of this rock may be seen on the southern flanks of the Black Mountains, Caermarthenshire, above the village of Cross-Inn. The Millstone-grit of the South-Welsh Coal-field, which goes by the name of ‘Farewell Rock’— from the fact that the miner on striking it bids farewell to coal, possesses the valuable property of being able to resist successfully for a length of time the action of most intense heat, and for this reason the ‘hearths’ of iron-furnaces are constructed of it.

Many travellers have spoken of the numerous traces of volcanic acrion to be found in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea; but the author states that he invariably found the ‘lava-currents ’ of M. de Saulcy to be nothing more than deposits of silica and nodules of oxide of iron, while his ‘extinct craters’ proved to be the flat summits of limestone-hills.

All facts from stray sources bearing on the connection between the Newer Tertiaries and existing faunas are worth placing on record, as they may hereafter unexpectedly throw light on important points of inquiry. The existing faunas radiating from the Boreal districts may, indeed, be expected to have much in common, together with species peculiar to each ocean, and to each side of each ocean; and the correspondence extends to species living in the Temperate and even the Sub-tropical districts. Kellia suborbicularis, Lasea rubra, and Saxicava pholadis of the Coralline Crag are now living along the whole coast from Vancouver to the Acapulcan district: and Erato Maugeriw, whose head-quarters are now in the West Indies, appeared in the Coralline, did not disappear in the Red Crag, is now living in the Bay of Panama, and is nearly, if not quite, identical with E. columbella of the Gulf and the Temperate shores of California.

The island of Tasmania is connected, as it were, with the continent of Australia by two chains of islands, the lines of which are afterwards continued in the mountain-syatems both of Tasmania and Australia. The Tasmanian systems pass from north to south in a strangely zigzag course, throughout which the mineralogical character of the rocks varies considerably. The land, therefore, may be presumed to have once presented a very different line of contour to what it does at the present day.

All geologists admit that the Lake-district of the North-west of England has been several times under the sea since the first upheaval of the alternating sedimentary and volcanic rocks of which it is composed; and few would be disposed to question that during the repeated processes of elevation land subsidence, whether continuous or intermittent, the sides of the mountains and valleys of this district have been long exposed, at different levels, to the action of waves, tides, and currents. We have reason to suppose that the duration of the last or intra-glacial submergence was at least as long as the time which has since elapsed; and if during the latter the sea has done so much to indent and modify our coasts, may we not expect to find the most obvious traces of its former denuding influence in regions which have risen above its level? Yet some of the pluvial, fluvial, glacial geologists of the present day would soon reduce the sea to a subordinate rank in the list of causes, were it not for the masterly advocacy of marine denudation which, with fresh arguments, may be found in the successive editions of the works of Sir Charles Lyell and Sir R. I. Murchison.

It was a dull December morning (but my companion and myself are no mere ‘parlour-geologists’) when we were bound for the Limestones and ‘Trap-rocks’ which lie about the valley of the Ceiriog, distant some eight or nine miles from Oswestry. After an early breakfast, we strapped on the munitions of war and looked well to the ‘commissariat’ and, determined to make the most of the short day-light, we turned our backs upon the good old town of Oswestry.

The claims of the sea as a denuding agent have been much disputed of late years; the meteoric and fluviatile theories of denudation have been revived; and the glacial theory has been extended, so as to encroach on what was once generally admitted to be the legitimate province of the sea. But, as a forgetfulness of, as well as too much reliance on, the power of the sea to modify, may become a fertile source of hasty and false generalization, it is well that the importance of waves, tides, and currents, as denuding causes, should be re-asserted, and attention directed afresh to the more striking monuments they have left behind them in regions removed from their present theatre of action. These monuments present an unmistakeable resemblance to the cliffs, buttresses, walled inlets, pillars, needles, &c., now in course of being formed by the sea; and in explaining them, the old principle of sound theorization —similar effects are referable to similar causes —is not to be set aside by overstraining the capabilities of any theory which will merely account for the phenomena.

In the midst of a comparatively tame and highly cultivated plain of New Red Sandstone near the centre of England, there rises up a part of the under crust of the earth which presents so much the appearance of an island as to lead the imagination at once to those remote ages when its porphyritic Peaks and Syenitic Knolls were surrounded by the sea. The geological history of this celebrated spot has been skilfully unravelled by Professors Sedgwick and Jukes (Article in Potters's Charnwood Forest); the Rev. W. H. Coleman (Article in White'Directory); Mr. Edward Hull (Memoirs of Geol. Survey); and others.

I have for some years had serious doubts as to the correctness of the Map of the Geological Survey so for as it relatesto the supposed presence of Millstone-grit in the northern portion of the Bristol Coal-field in the neighbourhood of Kingswood Hill; and in a foot-note to a most valuable lecture delivered by my friend Mr. Robert Etheridge, F.G.S. (of the RoyalSchool of Mines) at the Bristol Mining School in 1857, and published in a volume of Lectures issued by that Institution, Ihad, so long ago as that year, expressed doubts as to the existence of Millstone-grit at the surface near kingswood. Sincethen I have had much greater opportunities of investigating the matter, having taken, with my partners, a large tract of mineral property in that district; and the results of those investigations thoroughly confirm the doubts I had previously entertained, and in fact fully satisfy my mind that what is shown as Millstone-grit on the Government Geological Map, as also on the valuable map lately published by Mr. William Sanders, F.R.S., of Bristol, is really nothing more than one of thesandstones (the ‘Holmes Rock’) so common in the Coal-measures proper, and developed on a grand scale in the Pennant-grit dividing the Upper and Lower Coal-series of all the South-western Coal-fields.

In the map appended to the ‘Report on the Geology of Trinidad,’ we find the principal Tertiary coal-bearing strata of the Island indicated by a more or less irregular band of dark colour, strectching from Chaguanas, Couva, and Savonetta, on the western or Parian coast, to Manzanilla on the eastern or Atlantic side. To the north of this band lies a sterile region of detrital matter, chiefly siliceous, marked in the map by yellow with res sponts. I wish to draw attention more particularly to that part of this latter formation which lies on the eastern coast between the River Matura and Saline Bay.

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.

In the GeologicalMagazine, No. VII., Mr. C. B. Rose described the Brick-earth of the Nar Valley. To the list of Fossils which he gave at pp. 11 and 12, we can now add some minute but interesting forms, namely, four Bivalve Entomostraca and three Foraminifera. The former (all new species), determined by Mr. G. S. Brady, of Sunderland, are—