The following account of the geology of the Dead Sea basin A. has been compiled from the observations of others, and I am especially indebted in this connection to H. J. Johnson, Geologist of the United States Expedition to the Dead Sea, to Professor Louis Lartet, Geologist of the Due de Luynes' Expedition to the same region, and to Prof. Edward Hull, F.R.S., Director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, who visited Arabia Petraaa and Palestine in 1883–84, under the auspices of the Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund. Besides these observers, who devoted thei attention specially to the geology of the regions traversed during their several expeditions, the writer is under obligations to the Ordnance Survey of Palestine, and to many observant travellers, including Condor, Fraas, Tristram, Wilson, and others, for many interesting details and attractive descriptions concerning the regions to which it is desired to direct the reader's attention.

The specimen of which I give below a brief description is of some interest as adding to the store of facts which may help us in the elucidation of the obscure genus Cyclopteris. So far as I know such large Cyclopteris leaves have not been previously figured attached to a rachis.

Previous observations in British Columbia have shown that at one stage in the Glacial period—that of maximum glaciation—a great confluent ice-mass has occupied the region which may be named the Interior Plateau, between the Coast Mountains and Gold and Eocky Mountain Kanges. From the 55th to the 49th parallel this great glacier has left traces of its general southward or southeastward movement, which are distinct from those of subsequent local glaciers. The southern extensions or terminations of this confluent glacier, in Washington and Idaho Territories, have quite recently been examined by Mr. Bailley Willis and Prof. T. C. Chamberlin, of the U.S. Geological Survey. There is, further, evidence to show that this inland-ice flowed also, by transverse valleys and gaps, across the Coast Range, and that the fiords of the coast were thus deeply filled with glacier-ice which, supplemented by that originating on the Coast Range itself, buried the entire great valley which separates Vancouver Island from the mainland and discharged seaward round both ends of the island. Further north, the glacier extending from the mainland coast touched the northern shores of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

I Presume that most English students of Mesozoic Reptiles are acquainted, at least by report, with the magnificent collection of the remains of Sauropterygians and other Saurians from the Oxford Clay of Northamptonshire in the possession of Mr. A. N. Leeds, of Eyebury, near Peterborough. Those, however, who have not had the good fortune to see this unrivalled collection, can have no idea of its richness, or of the light it throws on the organization and affinities of the Sauropterygians of the later Jurassic seas.

Now that mapping constitutes such an essential part of field-work, it may be of use to some of your readers to connect together a few rules which have occurred to me on this subject.

Valley-Outcrops.—Professor Green has devised an admirably common sense method by which the outcrop of a flat rock-bed can be traced by means of contour lines. The main results gained from this method may be thus summed up:—

At several places along the north-eastern coast of the Isle of Wight the Osborne Beds crop out on the shore to some extent and admit of examination. From the great difficulty which is usually experienced by geologists in getting at any workable section or outcrop of these beds but little, one might say almost nothing, is known about them. There are few divisions of the Tertiary strata of the Island which present so many variations both of composition and of fossil contents as do the Osborne Beds at their various outcrops; and at the three places where they are most usually examined—at Whitecliff Bay, at St. Helen's, and at Alum Bay—they yield few fossils, and there is nothing extraordinary about the composition of the clayey strata.

The little Coral here described was discovered in Kaufman County, Texas, in strata of the Kipley Group, by Dr. R. H. Loughridge, and presented by him to me, together with a few characteristic molluscan species of that group which he found associated with it. The Ripley Group is the uppermost division of the Cretaceous series in the States which border upon the Gulf of Mexico; and probably represents approximately the Upper Chalk of England. Regarding it as a new generic form I herewith give a diagnosis and figures of it; and being the only species known to me, the diagnosis is necessarily based upon this alone.