This paper deals with a series of fossils from two localities in the coastal plain of Palestine sent to me by Mr. G. S. Blake, Geological Adviser to the Palestine Government. It is possible from their study to establish for the first time the presence of Oligocene beds in that country.

From November, 1930, till October, 1931, the Cambridge Expedition led by Dr. E. B. Worthington, carried out biological work on the Kenya and Uganda lakes. Owing to a grant from the Royal Society I was able to accompany the Expedition as geologist, with the object of studying the Pleistocene lake deposits and making collections of fossils from them.

TOBAGO, a picturesque island 26 miles long and 7½ miles wide, lies 20 miles north-east of Trinidad and rises to a height of about 1,900 feet. Geographically it is an indirect lateral offshoot of the Northern Range of Trinidad but geologically its structure has distinct and individual characters. The sequence of formations has been describedby Mr. E. H. Cunningham Craig and my sketch map is adapted from his map with a few additions, such as the Arca patricia bed at Red Point and the outlier of coral rock at Plymouth. I spent about a week on the island and devoted most of the time to work on the later formations.

Since the return of the St. George Expedition from the Pacific in 1925, a series of nine papers (2–8, 26, 27), describing the geology of most of the volcanic islands visited, has been published, and it is now possible to co-ordinate the results already arrived at, and to use them in an attempt to throw light on the structure of the Pacific basin.

The Hangman Grits of the Quantocks consist of a series of sand-stones, now, in most instances, practically converted into quartzites by the great pressure to which they were subjected during the Armorican movements, and occasional shales, which sometimes show cleavage. There are also beds, never of any great thickness, which bear a strong resemblance to the Keuper Marls. Fossils, other than a few obscure plant-remains, are unknown, except in the beds which are usually regarded as forming the top of the series, where marine fossils occur as casts in what is evidently a decalcified calcareous sandstone.

Since the Fenland Research Committee was formed in 1932, several papers have appeared, under its auspices, describing recent research work in the Fen District. The present article is a contribution to the work of this Committee, but describes deposits which are earlier in date than those which have been dealt with so far. The marine gravels have long been known near the town of March in Cambridgeshire, and the object here is to collect what is known up to the present (1934) about this deposit and to discuss its relation to the glacial and implementiferous deposits of southern Fenland and in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. The term “March Gravel” will be used here in reference to the sands and gravels which contain marine organisms and which are found on the “islands” between Peterborough on the west and the “Bedford River”, near Manea, on the east.

The purpose of this paper is to place on record some interesting occurrences of crinoids in the Scottish and Irish Carboniferous Limestones. Some of the descriptions of new species are preliminary to a fuller study of the subject.

The specimens described in the following pages were submitted to me for examination by Mr. F. R. Parrington, who obtained them “from the hard fine-grained flags in the bed of the Msimbasi River between the junction of a tributary called the Katkindu and the site where reptile remains (? Tangasaurus menneli) were collected about half a mile above the junction, approximately 4° 55′ S. lat.; 38° 57′ long.” (Sketch-map, I.) Though the material is for the most part fragmentary, it is a welcome addition to the palaeobotanical records from tropical Africa. The plants are from the region where Dr. E. O. Teale made a collection, which was described twelve years ago. Specimens from the same district and from beds of the same geological age had previously been described by Potonie. Teale assigned the plant-beds to the middle division of the Tanga series of the Karroo system and Potonié regarded the beds at his “Fundort V”, which corresponds to Mr. Parrington’s locality (sketch-map, I) as Rhaetic-Jura (?). My conclusion was that the plants indicated a Triassic or Rhaetic age. The additional fossils which Mr. Parrington kindly handed to me, though they cannot be said definitely to settle the age of the beds, indicate an Upper Triassic horizon.

The Millstone Grit and Coal Measure rocks of West Yorkshire include a series of sedimentary ironstones characterized by the spherulitic habit of the siderite. These rocks have been examined in detail in Airedale and Calderdale, and in brief visits to East Lancashire and South-West Yorkshire the author has recognized a similar development of ironstones, and so believes that the substance of this paper may be generally applicable to the whole of the central and southern Pennine region.

The igneous rocks of the Mountsorrel area, by reason of their accessibility and economic value, have attracted the attention of geologists since the middle of last century. The latest and most comprehensive account of the district is that of E. E. Lowe (1) and at the end of the paper a useful bibliography of earlier publications is given. Additional notes are to be found in the pamphlet published for the visit of the Geologists' Association to Charnwood Forest in 1928, including a structural study of the Mountsorrel “granite” by F. Jones (2).

At its southern end the western rift valley branches westwards from the trend of the main rift valley at a point just north of Lake Nyasa. Thence it continues northwards for a distance of approximately 1,000 miles, when it ends in the Sudan near Nimule.

RECENT reconnaissance surveys in south-west Persia have brought to our notice many examples of enigmatical structures preserved in massive limestones beautifully exposed in the naked mountains of that region. Application of many hypotheses involving faulting and thrusting proved impossible to satisfy the facts we had observed. We were at length forced to explain some of the structures we encountered as being produced by collapse of great sheets of limestone after removal of their original supporting cover accompanied by unsticking from their basement. Gravity alone provided the motive force. Simple folds, erosion, a shaly substratum, and gravity have induced massive beds of limestone to behave in an entirely unexpected manner. Examples are described below with sketches.

The Chapters on the Geology of Scotland, by B. N. Peach and John Home, reveals very clearly the complete divergence in the views of these two masters concerning certain fundamental problems of the Moine Series. Peach (1, pp. 199–200) regards the Moine Series as the equivalent of the Torridonian and its metamorphism as entirely post-Cambrian. Home (1, pp. 200–1), on the other hand, believes the Moine Series to consist mainly of sedimentary schists of pre-Torridonian age which formed part of the land-barrier separating the Cambrian sea in the North-West Highlands from that in which the fossiliferous Highland Border Rocks (Cambro-Ordovician) were laid down.

For a long period it was customary to base Echinoid classifi-cation exclusively on the characters of the test alone. It was not until the beginning of this century that other characters were also taken into consideration, starting with my work on the “Ingolf” Echinoidea I, 1903, in which I pointed out that characters of great classificatory value were found also in the structure of the pedicellariae and spicules. Through using these characters it was found that the numerous forms of Regular Echinoids, referred on account of the great uniformity of their test-characters to some few large “genera”, e.g. Echinus, Strongylocentrotus, Cidaris, in reality belonged to a number of various generic types, even to different families. In the following year, 1904, in my “Siam” Echinoidea, I pointed out that also the structure of the teeth was of primary classificatory importance, this being further worked out by Jackson, 1912, in his Phytogeny of the Echini, where the characters of the whole dental apparatus were found to afford characters of the greatest importance, and where the excellent names Aulodonta, Stirodonta, and Camarodonta were coined, names which will have to be adopted in Echinoid classification.

The object of this paper is to bring before the notice of those interested a number of examples of spherulitic structures which seem to throw some light on the nature of the processes by which spherulites, lithophysae, and pyromerides are formed.

During the summer of 1933 one of us (B. S.) began work upon the age and correlation of the Culm Measures of North Devon, and the opportunity was taken to collect specimens of the sandstone and of the dune sands of Westward Ho! for a petrological examination. It was felt that a comparison of the mineral content of the Culm rocks with those of similar age in South Wales, upon which work was proceeding at University College, Swansea, might be interesting, and that an examination of the dunes of North Devon might reveal to what extent the Culm had contributed to their mineral composition, and also might confirm some of the conclusions regarding the origin of some of the minerals in the dunes of South Wales (1).

THE sudden movement that causes a great earthquake must alter the conditions of strain in the surrounding crust. The strain may be increased in some regions and decreased in others and the changes may be great enough to precipitate or prevent the occurrence of what Mr. Oldham has called “sympathetic earthquakes”. It thus becomes of some interest to ascertain how far the influence of a great earthquake may extend from its source, and the present brief note is an attempt to examine this point in the case of one well-known and well-studied earthquake, that of Mino-Owari in Japan on 28th October, 1891.

SOME recent studies on the periodicity of earthquakes have thrown light on their origin and especially on that of their attendant after-shocks. The periods that are of most service for this purpose are the solar periods of one year and one day, the lunar periods of 29·6 and 14·8 days, and the period of 42 minutes due to the throbbing of the earth in consequence of the crustal displacement that gives rise to the earthquake. As a rule, the maximum epoch of the annual period falls either in midwinter or in midsummer, that of the diurnal period about midnight or noon, that of the period of 29·6 days close to the times of either new and full moon, that of the period of 14·8 days at or about the times of new and full moon or of first and last quarter, and that of the 42 minute period either with the return movements after their passage to the antipodes and back or half-way between these returns.

So little is known about the geology of the Amazon that it seems worth while recording a few observations made during a recent journey up that river.

The classificatory position of the genus Cyclocystoides remains shrouded in doubt. This is due in some measure to the paucity of the material available for study and the unsatisfactory state of preservation of many specimens. The greatest difficulty is, however, due to the fact that it presents many features which are unique, and which make its correlation with known groups far from a simple matter.