On the northern margin of the Firth of Forth, opposite Edinburgh, a line of steep craggy slope sweeps round from behind the village of Burntisland to the shore about half a mile eastward. The highest and most precipitous portion rises to a height of 631 feet; and the space between its base and the shore is so short that when seen from a short distance, the hill seems to shoot almost directly out of the sea. Hence these heights form conspicuous landmarks all over the Lothians. Their scarred fronts and verdurous slopes bear all the characteristic features of the minor hills in the lowlands of Scotland — a union of brown mouldering crag, often steep and bold, with soft green hollows, and with shelving sides that are either cumbered with ruins from the cliff overhead, or dotted with bushes of golden gorse. Such scenery is to a geological eye eminently ‘trappean;’ it at once suggests beds of greenstone, basalt, and ash, with the other concomitants of ancient volcanic eruptions. And truly amid all the rich development of volcanic phenomena in these Lowlands, the rocks of the Burntisland shore deserve to stand up as conspicuous landmarks. They have been laid bare by rains and frosts and the waves of the Firth along some miles of the coast-line, where they can be studied, bed after bed, in the minutest detail. I know of no such section in any other part of the kingdom.

The age of the sandstones and conglomerates, containing copper and other ores, at Alderley Edge, has until lately been a matter of some uncertainty; and, as far as I am aware, no detailed account of the formation has yet been published. Some few years since I made an examination, in company with Mr. E. W. Binney, F.R.S., of the beds in question, and on the first opportunity afterwards I hazarded an opinion, at a meeting of the Geological Society of Manchester, that the copper-bearing beds were referable to the age of the Lower Keuper Sandstone of the Trias. My brother-geologists, I had reason to think, received this opinion with some amount of distrust, as the rock, being in some places a quartzose conglomerate, and in others a soft whitish or yellowish sandstone, had much more the appearance of Bunter Sandstone than of the uppermost member of the Trias. My conjecture was not made, however, at hap-hazard, but was founded on evidence of position and petrographical characters, as the conglomerates, with their underlying bands of red shale, reminded me of the basement-beds of the Keuper division in the somewhat distant region of Alton Towers, and the Churnet Valley in Staffordshire.

The British Museum has lately received a fossil Fish from the lower Chalk at Folkestone, which appears to be undescribed, and is probably the type of a distinct genus. The fossil is twenty inches long, with the vertebral column and the fins tolerably well preserved, whilst the head unfortunately has suffered so much that scarcely any part of it can be distinguished.

In the well-known section at Whitecliff Bay the Chalk and the various Tertiary beds are seen to succeed one another in regular order northwards; and the dip, at first very high, so that the beds are almost vertical, decreases in that direction.