Carboniferous sandstones from within the thermal aureoles of igneous intrusions in the Midland Valley of Scotland sometimes have a strong, black colour and are termed ‘black sandstones’. Tait (1926) concluded that the black sandstones are the products of the thermal metamorphism of petroliferous sandstones, a theory which is discussed here in the light of modern petrological and geochemical techniques.

The black colour of the sandstones is due to an amorphous, opaque bitumen which usually coats illitic clays, fills porosity and was mostly emplaced at a fairly late diagenetic stage. This solid bitumen has a low reflectance (c. 0·15% R0), no fluorescence under blue-light excitation, is insoluble in organic solvents, is isotopically heavy and has a very low H/C atomic ratio. These data, together with the field relationships of the black sandstones and igneous intrusions, suggest that the bitumen was formed by the thermal alteration of hydrocarbons, as described by Tait (1926), rather than by other possible mechanisms such as the deasphalting of an oil, or the generation of hydrocarbons from organic-rich rocks heated by igneous intrusions, followed by fractionation during migration. This conclusion suggests that by the time of emplacement of the quartz-dolerite intrusions, and some of the alkali-dolerite sills, there had been widespread generation and migration of hydrocarbons which possibly could have been preserved to the present day where not thermally altered.

As is well known, one of the chief problems relating to the vertebrate nervous system is the question of its continuity or discontinuity both in the adult and in the embryo. The upholders of the latter theory believe that the neurones of the adult are not in continuity but only come into close contact by means of the synapses, while in the embryo the young nerve grows out through the tissues with a free end, and only secondarily unites with its particular end-organ. Much experimental, physiological, and pathological evidence has been brought forward in support of this view, and its upholders include most of the neurologists of the day, whose knowledge, however, relates chiefly to the higher vertebrates and who have made no, or at most very little, detailed study of the phenomena presented by the more primitive forms.

To those who study the progress of exact science, the common spinning-top is a symbol of the labours and the perplexities of men who had successfully threaded the mazes of the planetary motions. The mathematicians of the last age, searching through nature for problems worthy of their analysis, found in this toy of their youth, ample occupation for their highest mathematical powers.

No illustration of astronomical precession can be devised more perfect than that presented by a properly balanced top, but yet the motion of rotation has intricacies far exceeding those of the theory of precession.

In a former memoir (1934) the author described the early development of the ferret from fertilisation to the formation of the prochordal plate. The following is a continuation of that work and describes the development of the mesoblast and notochord from their incipient phases to a stage with seven somites when the definitive notochord begins to separate from the notochordal plate. As far as can be ascertained these phases have not been previously described in the case of the ferret, although the literature on gastrulation and the formation of the notochord and mesoblast is voluminous. A résumé of the descriptions and theories of gastrulation has already been fully summarised by Rabl (1915), and later by Van Oordt (1921). Opinions concerning notochord and mesoblast formation will be referred to in the following pages, and as there is great confusion of nomenclature in it I have appended a Glossary of the terms which I have used and the meanings that I attach to them (p. 188).

The Silurian arthropod Bembicosoma pomphicus Laurie, 1899 is re-studied in relation to other Palaeozoic chelicerate taxa. All three known specimens of Bembicosoma originate from the Silurian (late Llandovery) Eurypterid Bed of the Gutterford Burn Flagstones, Reservoir Formation, Pentland Hills, Scotland. Bembicosoma is removed from its previous tentative assignment to Eurypterida and re-assigned to Xiphosura. A morphological reconstruction of this taxon is presented for the first time. This work continues a reappraisal of the systematics of a number of taxa that belong within the synziphosurines, a loose grouping of early Palaeozoic chelicerate arthropods aligned with the Xiphosura (horseshoe crabs), but which have been mistakenly identified as eurypterids in the past. Bembicosoma is significant as it is one of the earliest known synziphosurines.

Records of flying Jurassic reptiles are very scarce in the Southern Hemisphere. Upper Jurassic pterosaurs have been discovered in marine Tithonian sediments of the Vaca Muerta Formation, in the Neuquén Basin, Patagonia, Argentina. Only four specimens are known so far: the first from Arroyo Picún Leufú, and the other three from the lithographic limestones of Los Catutos. Here, we update knowledge of Late Jurassic pterosaurs from northwest Patagonia. We revise the diagnosis and description of a previously described pterodactyloid, which is named as a new genus and species, Wenupteryx uzi. This small-sized pterosaur shows affinities with Euctenochasmatia or Archaeopterodactyloidea, and represents the most complete Jurassic pterosaur so far known from the Southern Hemisphere. We also report a recent finding suggesting that the new specimen belongs to a new species of pterodactyloid pterosaur. These records show that at least three different taxa of pterosaurs coexisted in the Neuquén Basin: Herbstosaurus, Wenupteryx and a more derived pterodactyloid that represents the largest pterosaur known from the Upper Jurassic of Gondwana.

Comparative anatomists have long desired detailed information on the placentation of the Sirenia. It is true that in 1878 Dr Paul Harting presented to the University of Utrecht a graduation thesis, in which he described the fœtal membranes and fœtus of a Dugong, which had been acquired a short time before for the Zoological Museum of that University. The specimen had been preserved for many years in spirit of wine, and had apparently been collected by a surgeon to a merchant ship. The fœtus was 27·8 centimetres (11 inches) long. The entire chorion, with the exception of the two poles and their immediate vicinity, was covered by densely packed, short and but little branched villi, and Dr Harting came to the conclusion that the placenta of the Dugong was diffuse and non-deciduate.

The special interest of South Georgia depends on its evidence regarding the geology of the part of the Southern Ocean which lies south of the South Atlantic. According to Professor Suess, the island is an extension of the Andes, which, at the southern end of South America, turn eastward, and by a great horse-shoe-shaped curve pass through South Georgia to the South Orkneys and Graham Land.

The geology of South Georgia is but little known. Thürach † described the island as consisting of metamorphic rocks, ranging from granular gneiss to clay-slate, and of diabase tuff.

Tristychius arcuatus, from the late Viséan of Scotland, is known from numerous ironstone nodule-encased specimens. These are reinvestigated using computerised tomography (CT) scanning and 3-D digital reconstruction methods. CT scans of the neurocranium (braincase) corroborate many features of the existing reconstruction, but also reveal new details of the gross proportions, the external morphology and, for the first time, features of the internal morphology, including the otic skeletal labyrinth. The unusual position of the articulation for the palatoquadrate on the ventral surface of the postorbital process is confirmed, but the area for the hyoid articulation is relocated posteriorly and the configuration of nerve foramina within the orbit is changed. A preliminary phylogenetic hypothesis is offered, suggesting a place for Tristychius within a sequence of early branching events in the elasmobranch lineage. In this, Tristychius is not resolved as a hybodontid, but is instead a stem elasmobranch possibly related to genera such as Acronemus, and exemplifying anatomical conditions close to the base of the Euselachii. As such, the neurocranium of Tristychius offers important insight into a defining feature of these early members of the anatomically advanced elasmobranchs: the origin of specialised phonoreception.

Through the kindness of Dr. A. Geikie, Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, I have had the pleasure of examining the fossil plants collected by the Scottish Geological Survey from the Calciferous Sandstones of Eskdale and Liddesdale.

The Late Carboniferous whip spider Graeophonus anglicus Pocock, 1911 (Arachnida: Amblypygi), is redescribed on the basis of the holotype and nine other specimens all preserved in sideritic nodules from the British Middle Coal Measures of Coseley, Staffordshire, UK. This species is clearly basal with respect to most living whip spiders, expressing numerous plesiomorphic character states and can be referred to both the suborder Paleoamblypygi and the ‘living fossil’ family Paracharontidae (with one Recent species), the latter based on an explict character of dorsal spination on the pedipalp femur. This suggests that crown-group Amblypygi originated by at least the mid-Palaeozoic.

In the species Cavia the female passes into a condition of heat immediately, or almost immediately, after the birth of a litter, and pregnancy can be repeated without any interval. The new blastocysts reach the uterine cavity on the fifth day after parturition, and during the first seven days of pregnancy extensive reparative changes take place. These changes involve not only the healing of the placental site but a shedding and restoration of the epithelial lining of the uterus. As this process does not seem to have been investigated in detail in the guinea-pig, it is proposed in this paper to describe briefly the histological changes occurring in uteri at different times post partum in non-pregnant animals. It will be necessary, however, before describing the histological details of these post-partum changes to give a brief summary of the observations of other investigators on the ante-partum changes associated with the implantation of the blastocyst, the subsequent obliteration of the uterine cavity, the formation of the decidua capsularis, and the reappearance of the uterine lumen.

In the specimen under consideration there were fifteen pairs of ribs, of which nine pairs were vertebro-sternal. The costal cartilage associated with each of these was long and very flexible. The articulation of the first pair of costal cartilages with the sternum was effected by means of a short but strong band of fibrous tissue, which permitted considerable freedom of movement and did not form a junction of the more or less rigid character seen in man.

In this paper the results of observations of the elevation of the boiling point of aqueous solutions of electrolytes are given, and a few results of observations of the depression of the freezing point, together with conductivity data obtained by observations of conductivity at about 99·4° and 0° Centigrade.

Since its discovery by Dumas and Péligot in 1834, methyl-alcohol has been the subject of a great many researches, and as a result we have long had a perfectly certain knowledge of its atomic composition, and a very accurate knowledge of a great many of its reactions. Yet the physical properties of the substance CH4O have not yet been determined with a satisfactory degree of precision. At this we need not wonder. For the study of the transmutations of a species a very impure specimen may suffice, and a series of such studies may leave no doubt about the correct atomic formula of the species in question, and consequently also, if it is a volatile substance, about its perfect gas density. But no other physical properties can be determined otherwise than by direct experiments on a pure specimen. And pure methyl-alcohol is very difficult to obtain. In whatever reasonable sense we may take the word “pure,” as attached to the name of a chemical preparation, “pure” methyl-alcohol must be admitted to have been little more than a chemical fiction until Wöhler in 1852 discovered his well-known (oxalate) process for its extraction from wood-spirit.

The permanent record obtained with Mr T. A. Edison's phonograph has afforded a new opportunity of investigating the nature of spoken sounds, and the method which this invention placed at our disposal appears to us to possess several important advantages.

This method consists in obtaining a magnified transcript on paper of the indentations impressed by spoken vowels on the tinfoil of the phonograph, and then subjecting the periodic wave-forms thus obtained to harmonic analysis.

The curves as drawn in ink on paper represent to a large scale the surface of a longitudinal section of the tinfoil made along the centre of the furrow impressed by the pricker of the phonograph. The forms impressed on the tinfoil depend essentially on the movement which a particle of air performs when the given sound is being uttered, and the harmonic constituents of each period of the continuous wave-form indicate the relative proportions in which the prime tone and its harmonics are present in the sound.

We thus obtain what may be called a harmonic analysis of the vowel sounds.

The main phase (∼400 Ma) emplacement of the central and northern part of the reversely zoned Galway Granite was incremental by progressive northward marginal dyke injection and stoping of the 470–467 Ma Connemara metagabbro-gneiss country rock. The space was provided by the synchronous ESE-opening, along the strike of the country rocks, of extensional fractures generated successively northward by a releasing bend in the sinistrally moving Skird Rocks Fault or an equivalent Galway Bay Fault. This fault is a prolongation of the Antrim–Galway (a splay off the Highland Boundary Fault) and Southern Upland Faults. The ESE-strike of the spalled-off rocks controlled the resultant ESE-elongated shape of the batholith. The magma pulses (∼5–30 m in thickness) were progressively more fractionated towards the northern margin so that the coarse Porphyritic (or Megacrystic) Granite (GP; technically granodiorite) in the centre was followed outwards by finer grained, drier and more siliceous granite, until the movements opening the fractures ceased and the magma became too viscous to intrude. ‘Out-of-sequence’ pulses of more basic diorite-granodiorite (including the Mingling–Mixing Zone) and late main phase, more acid, coarse but Aphyric Granite, into the centre of the batholith, complicated the outward fractionation scheme. The outward expansion, caused by the intrusions into the centre, caused a foliation and flattening of cognate xenoliths within the partly crystallised northern marginal granite and in the Mingling–Mixing Zone to the south.

Late phase (∼380 Ma) central intrusions of the newly-discovered aphyric Shannapheasteen Finegrained Granite (technically granodiorite), the Knock, the Lurgan and the Costello Murvey Granites, all more siliceous and less dense than the GP, were emplaced by pushing up the already solid and jointed GP along marginal faults. This concentration of lighter granites plus compression shown in thrusting, caused overall fault uplift of the Central Block of the Galway batholith so that the originally deepest part of the GP is exposed where there is the most late phase granite. Chemical analyses show the main and late phase magmas, including late dykes, were very similar, with repetition of the same fractionation except that the late phase magmas were drier and more quickly cooled, giving finer grained rocks.

The following account deals with investigations pursued by the authors during the years 1931 and 1932. Pressure of other and later work precluded the possibility of the results of the investigations being published until this year. It is believed that no recent account of the cuticular-scale pattern of monotreme hairs has been published, and the authors are convinced of the desirability of such a detailed description. When this work was commenced it was intended to be the first of a series of investigations into the scale- pattern of mammalian hairs. Hitherto work in this direction has only taken the form of either a consideration of one species only, or generalisations upon the scale-pattern of a group of mammals. Such generalisations would appear to be often unjustified for the following reasons: In many instances they are based first upon an insufficient number of observations along the length of each fibre, and secondly upon a technique of preparing the fibres for examination which would seem to be inadequate for accurate vision of all the delicate lines marking the boundaries of the scales. Although notable attempts to indicate these boundaries have been made (Hausman, 1920; Glaister, 1931), in the authors' opinion the results have not been satisfactory. Moreover, until Manby's methods, described in previous papers and also in this account, were perfected, there has been no really satisfactory method of photographing cuticular-scale patterns accurately.

The thermodynamic relations embodied in the Quasicrystalline Model of Burnham and Nekvasil (1986), as recently extended by the author, have been used to quantitatively assess the feldspar-quartz liquidus relations in two I-type (Jindabyne and Moruya) and two S-type (Bullenbalong and Dalgety) suites of Australian granites, using analytical data provided by B. W. Chappell and co-workers. Among the more notable results obtained from these calculations at a constant pressure of 5·0kbar and = 0·30 (≍2·8 wt% H2O), for purposes of comparison, are that: (1) felsic melts of remarkably uniform, but distinctive composition can be extracted from each suite, leaving solid residues in amounts up to 65 mol%; (2) all melts from both S-type suites have two feldspars plus quartz on their liquidii, whereas both I-type suites have only plagioclase plus quartz on their liquidii; (3) the total solid residue ranges from 27-63% in the Jindabyne suite, from 15–62% in the Moruya suite, from 30–65% in the Bullenbalong suite, and from 27–65% in the Dalgety suite; (4) liquidus temperatures of the S-type Bullenbalong and Dalgety melts are similar (856° and 860°C), reflecting similar feldspar compositions of An53, Or75 and An60, Or77, respectively; (5) liquidus temperatures of the I-type Jindabyne and Moruya melts, however, are distinctly different (950° and 894°C), reflecting correspondingly different plagioclase compositions of An80 and An52; (6) the calculated liquidus plagioclase composition throughout a given suite is very uniform (±1%) and amounts to as much as 46% of the total rock; and (7) these calculated liquidus and residual plagioclase compositions are also the same, within the uncertainty of measurement, as those of the plagioclase crystal-cores determined optically by A. J. R. White. The only plausible explanation for this remarkable consanguinity in plagioclase liquidus, residue, and crystal-core compositions, hence liquidus temperatures, is that the bulk of the residue is restite, in accordance with the model of White and Chappell (1977). This explanation is corroborated by the very systematic variations in the amounts of individual restite minerals with respect to total restite contents. Accordingly, those members of each suite that contain more than 60% total restite probably closely represent the bulk composition of the source rock, which is dioritic or andesitic for the Jindabyne suite, tonalitic or dacitic for the Moruya suite, pelitic metagreywacke for the Bullenbalong suite, and feldspathic metagreywacke for the Dalgety suite. As a corollary, those members with less than 60% restite must have undergone melt-restite segregation (unmixing), probably during ascent and emplacement.

A new flower preserved in amber in sediments of Simojovel de Allende, México, is identified as an extinct member of Staphyleaceae, a family of angiosperms consisting of only three genera (Staphylea, Turpinia and Euscaphis), which has a large and abundant fossil record and is today distributed over the Northern Hemisphere. Staphylea ochoterenae sp. nov. is the first record of a flower for this group, which is small, pedicelled, pentamer, bisexual, with sepals and petals with similar size, dorsifixed anthers and superior ovary. Furthermore, the presence of stamens with pubescent filaments allows close comparison with extant flowers of Staphylea bulmada and S. forresti, species currently growing in Asia. However, their different number of style (one vs. three) and the apparent lack of a floral disc distinguish them from S. ochoterenae. The presence of Staphyleaceae in southern Mexico ca. 23 to 15My ago is evidence of the long history of integration of vegetation in low-latitude North America, in which some lineages, such as Staphylea, could move southwards from high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, as part of the Boreotropical Flora. In Mexico it grew in association with tropical elements, as suggested by the fossil record of the area.