Early in 1905 a small fragment of a meteoric iron from Uwet in Southern Nigeria was received at the Imperial Institute from Mr. John Parldnson, the Principal of the Mineral Survey then proceeding in Southern Nigeria. The fragment was part of a large mass which was held in great veneration by the natives of Uwet (lat. 5° 17' p N., long. 8° 15' p E.), a town on the Calabar river, about 23 miles north by west of Calabar. Later, further particulars of the meteorite were communicated to the Imperial Institute by Mr. E. D. Simpson.

Some specimens of calcite which I obtained recently from a chalkpit at Corfe Castle in Dorsetshire appear worthy of description on account of their somewhat unusual habit and of the rarity of wellcrystallized minerals in the Chalk.

The pit is situated in the Upper Chalk, not far from the great overthrust fault which traverses the Isle of Purbeck from west to east along the boundary of the Chalk and the overlying Tertiary beds. The Chalk is here steeply inclined, with a northerly dip, and is much indurated, being sufficiently hard to be worked for road-metal.

In recent years a number of alkali-rich rocks have been described, containing barkevikite or 'barkevikitic hornblende.' So far as I am aware, however, no detailed examination has been made of the mineral since Brögger's work on the original material from Barkevik in Norway, with the exception of the investigation by Michel Levy and Laeroix. Hence, when a rock was found amongst the Permo-Carboniferous rocks of Ayrshire, with comparatively large crystals of barkevikite, it was decided to examine it in some detail.

The specimen to which this paper refers, is one of a number of minerals from Kurdistan, presented to the Hunterian Museum, in Glasgow University, by Mr. D. Ferguson, to whom I am indebted for the following particulars of the occurrence. The exact locality is the Zarshuran River, in Kurdistan, where a large mineral vein, which has been worked for centuries for orpiment, is found. The country-rock is red sandstone, overlying, unconformably, altered slates and schists, which are intruded by a boss of felspathic granite or syenite. Near the surface the vein-stone is chiefly a kind of calc-sinter, but this disappears as the depth increases and calcite becomes the predominant mineral in the gangue, being associated with some quartz and fluorspar.

In nearly every thin section of a rock containing monoelinic pyroxenes it will be found that one or more crystals twinned on the orthopinacoid (100) are included. In such crystals the twin-plane is marked very clearly by the difference of relative retardation and extinction, and also by the interference-bands if the twin-plane is inclined to the plane of section. For the purposes of the complete optical determination, it is essential for the proposed method that one half of the twin should exhibit the emergence of an optic axis suitable for the determination of the optic axial angle by the Becke method.

Last winter I enjoyed the good fortune of spending some three months at Zweisimmen in the Bernese Oberland of Switzerland, in order to participate in the winter sports. Happily it proved a fine, cold winter of hard frosts and moderately heavy total snowfall. During such a stay in the crisp, dry cold of a snow-mantled world, the manifold and beautiful forms assumed by snow and ice are set before one in a manner impossible in this relatively warm and moist isle with its fleeting glimpses of true wintry weather.

In 1912 the writer proposed the name voelckerite (in honour of Dr. John Augustus Voelcker, the well-known English agricultural chemist, who made important contributions to our knowledge of the~ chemistry of apatlte) for the basic calcium phosphate, 3Ca2(PO4)2.CaO , related to apatite. The fact that apatite is often deficient in fluorine and chlorine was proved by Voelcker and by Hoskyns-Abrahall, both of whom gave as the general formula of apatite 3Cas(PO4)2.Ca(F2,C]2,O ) or its equivalent Ca10(PO4)6(F2,Cl2,O ). Carnot also noted the deficiency of chlorine and fluorine in apatite from Tyrol, but he offered no explanation.