A considerable collection of mammalian bones obtained by the officers of the Egyptian Geological Survey, and sent to England by Captain H. Lyons for determination, proves to contain a number of specimens of great interest. The remains unfortunately are, for the most part, very fragmentary and in many cases quite indeterminable, but they are still sufficient to indicate the existence in Northern Egypt of several distinct mammalian faunas, the oldest being of Lower Miocene age, the most recent probably late Pleistocene and including species now living in the Nile Valley.

Considering the prime importance attaching to the subject in almost every branch of geological inquiry, it is not a little remarkable that so little has hitherto been done towards obtaining precise measures of the actual waste of land-surfaces and comparing the rates at which the agents of destruction operate at the present time in different districts. Arrangements have indeed been made during recent years to observe systematically the results of marine erosion on our coast-lines, but concerning the far more important subject of subaërial erosion we have exceedingly few accurate data.

In the nomenclature of fossil Myoxidæ, the generic term Myoxus has hitherto been used in a broad sense, under the assumption that the distinctive characters of the recent genera of the family are not apparent in their Tertiary representatives. It is my purpose to show in the present note that this is not the case, there being in the Middle Miocene, at any rate, two forms of Myoxidæ, one a Muscardinus, the other an Eliomys, which have been mixed up together by several previous writers, under the name Myoxus Sansaniensis.

The discovery of a coalfield in 1890 at Dover, in a boring at the foot of Shakespeare Cliff, has been already brought before the British Association by the author at Cardiff in 1892, and is so well known that it is unnecessary to enter into details other than the following. The Carboniferous shales and sandstones contain twelve seams of coal, amounting to a total thickness of 23 feet 5 inches. These occur at a depth of 1,100 feet 6 inches below Ordnance datum, and have been penetrated to a depth of 1,064 feet 6 inches, or 2,177 feet 6 inches from the surface. They are identical, as I have shown elsewhere, with the rich and valuable coalfields of Somersetshire on the west, and of France and Belgium on the east

There is every reason to believe that in the near future the supplies of coal lying beneath the Red Rocks of the Midland counties will have to be relied upon to meet the increasing demand. Workable seams of coal have been met with at reasonable depths beneath the Red Rocks surrounding the South Staffordshire Coalfield, but there remain large areas lying between the known coalfields of Shropshire, North Staffordshire, and Nottinghamshire, which have not at present been explored. Within this region, as shown on the published maps of the Geological Survey, there are considerable areas of so-called Permian rocks, which recent investigations have proved to be conformable to the Upper Coal-measures and to contain a Coal-measure flora. Thus Mr. T. C. Cantrill has shown that in the Forest of Wyre the so-called Permian rocks contain thin coal-seams and bands of Spirorbis limestone.

A mutilated skull of an Ungulate from the Upper Miocene of Samos, purchased by the Geological Department of the British Museum in 1894, was in that year (before I left Europe) identified by me as a Leptodon, and under this name it was registered (M 5,419).