We are not ashamed to confess our ignorance when we meet with anything we do not understand. On the contrary, we regard such confessions as one of the roads to knowledge; and we always wished it to be one of the features of this magazine that matters not understood should be brought before the world in its pages. We set the example ourselves in the most prominent part of our journal—its opening pages.

Few things are so little understood as fossil vegetables, and least of all are fossil fruits.

Some new species from the lower chalk of Rochester have just been added to the national collection in the British Museum, and we lay our drawings of them before our readers with the frank admission that we do not know what they are, and we ask as frankly for information or suggestions.

Some indeed, such as the coffee-like berries, fig-like fruits, and nipadites of the London Clay, carry in themselves the palpable evidence of the classes to which they belong; but there are many specimens from other rocks remaining undescribed in many a collector's cabinet from the want of the ability to give anything like a reasonable suggestion as to what they were, and often, indeed, from the sheer incapacity to assign to them even any probable affinities.