The series of beds containing graptolites in New Zealand occur in the Whakamarama district, which is situated in almost the extreme north-west of the South Island. They consist of intercalated bands of quartzite and carbonaceous argillites, with a north and south strike and dipping at a low angle to the west. As a result of the natural erosion of the land surface taking place more rapidly in the slaty layers than in the harder quartzites, the ridges and stream valleys exhibit a noticeable parallelism, those streams which enter the sea on the western coast usually taking a very sharp bend to the west, and with a somewhat gorgy channel to the sea. The valleys are for the most part densely clothed with forest trees, while the ridges of quartzite are barren, with the exception of a stunted growth of manuka (Leptospermum scoparium and L. ericoides), and in places a covering of peat to a depth of a few inches.

The general appearance of this rock in thin section is of an interlocking framework of plagioclase, augite, and iron-ores, with micropegmatite occupying the interstices. The mutual relations of the felspar and augite vary considerably. The felspar may be entirely enclosed in the augite. In this case it is very basic and only faintly zoned. The most common relation is for the augite to enclose the terminations of the felspar laths, the sub-ophitic structure of Watts. But frequently idiomorphic crystals of augite are found partly or wholly enclosed in felspar. The latter is then more acid than the ophitic felspar, and is broadly zoned. These varying relations may frequently be found within the limits of a single slide.

Since the exhibition of the diamond in a dolerite at York and Mexico by Professor Edgeworth David, great interest has been aroused in the Copeton occurrence. Specimens of the rock and concentrates washed from it were forwarded by the prospector, Mr. Pike, to several gentlemen who had expressed their desire to examine them, and amongst others to Professor Miers. It was my privilege, whilst at Oxford, to examine these specimens, and the results of this examination were conveyed in a letter to Mr. Pike. As he has published part of its contents in the Australian Mining Standard, it is desirable to place before British readers a more connected account, and at the same time to give an outline of the not very easily accessible Australian literature.

I have recently had the good fortune to come across the lost type-specimen of Phillips' Melania vittata in the course of going through the contents of one of the reserve cabinets in the Manchester Museum. The specimen was along with a number of others which formed part of the late Professor Williamson's collection, and my attention was drawn to it being the type by seeing a label attached bearing the following inscription: “This specimen is figured in Phillips' Geol. York., pl. 7, fig. 15.” A comparison with Phillips' figure confirmed this fact.

The following particulars were obtained with the assistance of Mr. Isaac Sumsion, jun., Hon. Sec. of the Golf Club:—

Corundum is one of those rather exceptional rock-formers whose mode of origin is not fully explained, and it is, accordingly, of interest to put on record any new localities for the mineral, together with the features they present. Fragments of it have frequently been found among the old gravels of the Limpopo River, along the Transvaal-Rhodesian and Transvaal-Bechuanaland border, but although the Transvaal Geological Survey has described an occurrence in the Pietersburg district, the source of these fragments for some time remained unknown. However, last year I received from the Rhodesian side of the border, close to Rhodes' Drift on the Limpopo, and north-ward from the well-known Messina copper-mine, some rocks which included large pieces of a type rich in corundum. The area is known to comprise gneissose granulites, consisting of the contact zone and marginal modifications of a granite mass, and the specimens received included large cleavage fragments of felspar and pieces of coarse granite.

Schimper (Traité de Paléontologie végétale, t. iii, p. 680) established in 1874 his Étage paléocène pour les “Sables de Bracheux, Travertins anciens, Lignites et grés du Soissonnais”, which are coeval with the Thanet Sands and the Woolwich Series. As there is a natural break between these and the London Clay (=the French Sables de Cuise), and as the Eocene contained more varied faunas than the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene Tertiaries, I accepted that division in my description of the Kopenhague fauna, which formed the Lower Palæocene, together with the Montien of Belgium, older marine beds which are unknown in England.

In the February and March issues of the Geological Magazine for 1908 I published a general account of the underground water-supply of the óasis of Kharga, in the Libyan Desert, and briefly referred to the influence of one bore on another.

One of the most interesting and most vexed questions in vertebrate palæontology at the present day is the one which concerns the origin and development of the reptiles. The progress of research has shown the Reptilia to be a wonderfully diverse class, and nearly thirty orders of animals have been assigned to the group. With all this diversity of structure there is, of course, associated a great diversity of habit. We know all kinds of extinct reptiles from the semi-aquatic to the aquatic, from the flying to the fossorial, from the arboreal to the subterranean, and many are the varying degrees of structure which are associated with these various habits of life.

At the Glen-Parva Brickworks, Wigston, near Leicester, is the finest section of the Rhætic beds that is to be seen in the Midlands. The large subcircular pit where the beds are displayd at once arrests the attention of the traveller on the adjacent railway as an excavation of more than usual size.

Mr. Geo. G. Holmes and others have observed the remarkable and highly suggestive fact that not only do the schists (which contain in many places interlaminated beds of quartzites and massive crystalline limestone, e.g. in the Dwarsberg on the Magalakwin River in the Northern Transvaal) appear interbedded in the gneisses, but that the strike foliation and planes of schistosity of these old schists and of the gneisses seem invariably to be parallel.

During the past year several igneous erratic boulders have been noticed on the cliffs of South Pembrokeshire by Mr. A. L. Leach and myself, in situations where no such erratics were previously known, so that a record of the larger ones seems advisable; five of them being dealt with in the following paper. At Mewsford Point, near St. Govan's Head, there is a well-rounded boulder measuring 4 ft. 1 in. × 2 ft. 6 in. and about 2ft. 6in. high, weighing approximately 32 cwt., and visible from some distance because its outline and dark colour differ markedly from the surrounding crags of Carboniferous Limestone. It appears to be the southernmost igneous erratic boulder in Pembrokeshire, and hence is of more than usual interest.

The shore and dune sand of St. Ives Bay is typically light-coloured owing to the predominance of calcareous matter in the form of shell fragments, etc. But the actual proportion of the platy shell fragments to the heavier and more granular ingredients of the sand varies considerably, especially within the limits of high- and lowwater marks, as is usually the case. Some of the heavier ingredients are dark-coloured, and may be observed to have been streaked out in bands or aggregated in patches at the surface, where they have been concentrated by the action of the waves. Where heavy minerals abound, tidal action can be seen to have effected a persistent concentration about the mean high-water mark, where the heavier ingredients predominate for at least a foot beneath the surface. Such a band can be easily traced for a considerable distance in the vicinity of the Red River.

The appearance of Professor E. Weinschenk's paper at the close of last year on two specimens of Moldavite from Kuttenburg, in Bohemia, affords a convenient opportunity of recording occurrences of the related ‘obsidianites’ (referred to by Professor Weinschenk as Billitonite and Australite) in the Malay Peninsula.

Mr. Osmond Fisher, in an article in the January number of this Magazine, entitled “Convection Currents in the Earth's Interior”, speaks of my views in a way that may give a false conception of what they are on the subject of overthrusts. He appears (inadvertently, no doubt) to credit me with a disbelief in the thrust-planes occurring in the North-West Highlands. I may say at once that I am one of those who admire the way in which a band of enthusiastic geologists have worked out the structure of this most difficult tract of country, and thoroughly believe in the correctness of their conclusions. The principal object of my little paper in the November number of this Magazine (1908) was to caution geologists not to push their new-born views too far in trying to account for structural difficulties by overthrusts. It must be remembered that the Moine thrust-plane has been proved to no more than 10 miles overlap, but may, of course, be much more. Incidentally, I thought the paper likely to elicit a correspondence helping the interpretation of the phenomena of overthrusts.

Mr. J. Hays Hammond in his paper, “Gold-mining in the Transvaal, South Africa,” read at the Richmond meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers in February, 1901, referring to this Old Granite, states: “There are at places intrusions from this enveloping granitic mass into the younger formations.”