In the Summer of 1900 the present writer on a visit to Newquay casually observed a deposit containing land shells near the Lifeboat House by Towan Head. The description of the little section was included in a joint paper by Mr. A. S. Kennard and himself on the “Post-Pliocene Non-marine Mollusca of the South of England” and fortunately assigned in error to the Pleistocene period.

It was a dull December morning (but my companion and myself are no mere ‘parlour-geologists’) when we were bound for the Limestones and ‘Trap-rocks’ which lie about the valley of the Ceiriog, distant some eight or nine miles from Oswestry. After an early breakfast, we strapped on the munitions of war and looked well to the ‘commissariat’ and, determined to make the most of the short day-light, we turned our backs upon the good old town of Oswestry.

The genera Phillipsastræa and Smithia have long been a source of trouble to palæontologists, and since the establishment of the latter genus in 1851, it has been very doubtful in which of the two genera certain species of Corals should be placed. The more extended our acquaintance with the species belonging to both genera became, the more probable it seemed that the distinctions between them were in reality unimportant and insufficient to justify a division into two different genera. It was in fact proposed by Kunth as early as 1870 that both genera should be united under the earlier name Phillipsastræa. It has been stated that Phillipsastræa possesses a columella, while Smithia has none; upon the truth of this statement the retention of the two genera depends. Kunth has denied the existence of such a difference. Nevertheless both genera are still retained. From a careful study of the specimens in the British Museum (Natural History) and in the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge, I have come to the conclusion that Kunth's opinion is well founded; and in the following remarks I shall further attempt to show that certain species which are still sometimes described as having a true columella do not really possess one.

Through the great kindness of Professor Suess I have received the full text of his paper on Hot Springs, read before the Congress of Naturforscher und Aerzte held last year in Karlsbad, in which he adduces very strong arguments in favour of their being due to vapours given off from the molten interior of the earth as it gradually cools. I have for a long time been observing the hot springs that occur in the Cape Colony, and had come to the conclusion that they were surface-waters that had sunk deep into the earth's crust, and were returned heated in consequence of their having been in the neighbourhood of potential fusion of the rocks. This latter view I alluded to in a recent paper, and I do not like to have to give up a long-cherished idea before submitting to the public a statement of the reasons that led me to my view of the subject.

The Aru Archipelago consists of a group of some eighty low islands which rise from the shallow sea between western New Guinea and Australia. They have been interpreted by Wichmann (1887, pp. 120–1) as the south-eastern members of an arc, to which he assigned also the Sula, Obi, and Misool Islands, and part of the south-western coast of New Guinea. This arc he regarded as the easternmost of three arcs at the eastern end of the Banda Sea. This view has been adopted, amongst others, by Koto (1899, p. 97, pl. i). The Aru Islands consist, according to the account in Verbeek's “Molukken Verslag” (1908, pp. 9, 464–5, fig. 420), of an almost horizontal limestone plateau, which has been broken by uplift into more than eighty pieces.

On hearing that Mr. G. E. Dibley, F.G.S., had exhibited at the June meeting of the Geologists' Association some test-plates of Marsupites from the Chalk of a new road near Russell Hill, I made inquiries of him, and he most kindly told me the particular locality where he and others had obtained these fossils. As the place was within an easy walk of my home, I visited it, in company with the younger members of my family, on an evening in June, and found, as Mr. Dibley had told me, that the greater part of the Chalk had been refilled into the sewer-trench, and the residue had been spread over the roadway and was now partly trodden down by the traffic. We patiently broke a number of the remaining blocks of chalk, and, in spite of the fact that Mr. Dibley had already carefully worked at the place, succeeded in finding not only a couple of plates of Marsupites with Echinocorys scutatus, etc., but also some smaller inconspicuous plates which, when cleaned from the matrix, proved to be test-plates of the unstalked, free-swimming crinoid, Uintacrinus, Grinnell. These showed the existence at this place of the lower portion of the Marsupites-zone, which has been designated by Dr. Rowe the “Band of Uintacrinus.”

The rocks of this series form an interrupted belt along the southern border of the Highlands from Stonehaven on the east to the island of Arran on the west, and they appear again on a more extensive scale in Ireland. In Scotland the series consists of cherts or jaspers and shales, sometimes associated with limestones and with some peculiar igneous rocks. The age of the series has been for years a matter of controversy. Many geologists have held that these rocks are of pre-Cambrian age, but Messrs. Peach & Horne in their volume on The Silurian Rocks of Britain (Mem. Geol. Surv., 1899) remarked on the close resemblance of the rocks of this belt to some of the Arenig rocks in the Southern Uplands of Scotland, and the belt has been marked on the Geological Survey maps as doubtfully Lower Silurian.

During a short vacation visit to Derbyshire I have had the opportunity of making some further notes on burrows in limestone rocks, which may be worth recording. These burrows, it will be remembered, have been attributed by Messrs. Darbyshire, Mackintosh, and others, to the action of Pholades, a conclusion which I ventured to oppose, after an examination of several instances in the neighbourhood of Llandudno. Mr. Darbyshire calls attention, in his paper, to the occurrence of these burrows near Buxton, on Grin Edge and Harper Hill, at a height of about 1400 feet above the sea. I was therefore fully prepared to meet with them in the Carboniferous Limestone in other parts of the county.

Gold-bearing sandstone and conglomerate near the base of the Proterozoic Mporokoso Group were deposited in a braided river system. The detrital sand grade material is mainly of quartz, sericite and haematite, and the pebbles are of vein-quartz, chert, silicic volcanics, quartzose metasediment and jaspilite. The basement rocks presently exposed in the basement are silicic igneous rocks and quartzose metasediments.

The petrography of the fluvial sediments suggests that silica and, to a lesser extent, iron oxide were mobile both in the source-area and in the braided river system. Evidence for silica-mobility includes jaspilite pebbles with spherulites and glaebules of chalcedony, abundant vein-quartz pebbles, intra-basinal sandstone pebbles, and the silicification of volcanic pebbles. The detrital haematite in the fluvial sandstone forms pseudomorphs after magmatic magnetite. Authigenic iron oxide occurs in several forms which suggest that iron oxide was mobile in the source-area and in the fluvial sediments. Uranium is locally abundant in basement and sedimentary rocks, cassiterite is a common heavy mineral in the fluvial sediments, and fluorite has been found in the basement.

These features may be explained by intense weathering which mobilized both silica and iron. The silica was concentrated near the surface to form silcretes in the basement and later in the overlying fluvial sediments. Hydrothermal convection cells driven by the granites may have carried silica, iron, tin, fluorine and uranium towards the surface before and during the erosion of the igneous basement.

A Porose corals have, with few exceptions, received little attention in Britain since the publication of works by P. M. Duncan and R. F. Tomes, during the latter half of last centary. The newer methods of investigation by means of thin slices and serial sectioning, so successfully employed by Drs. Stanley Smith and W. D. Lang, and others, in the Rugosa, were not then in use, and so very little is known of the internal structures–the only basis for classification and comparison–or of the developmental stages of the Aporosa.

It was my good fortune in 1884 to receive two interesting collections of fossil plants from New Zealand, for which I am indebted to the kindness of Professor (now Sir Julius) von Haast, of Christchurch, and Professor T. J. Parker, of Dunedin. In these collections seventeen localities of fossil plants are represented which belong to three formations: the Tertiary, the Cretaceous, and the Triassic formations.

The Twenty-third volume of the Palæontographical Society's published Monographs has just reached us. It represents the annual volume for 1869; so that, thanks to the energetic exertions of the Honorary Secretary, the Rev. T. Wiltshire, M.A., F.G.S., we have now ten months during which the volume for 1870 may appear, thus bringing the date of issue once more even with the current year's subscription.

While working for several years on Palaeozoic Bryozoa with the aim of establishing the Palaeozoic stratigraphy of the Altai Mountains on the basis of the Bryozoan faunas, I have always been aware of a great contradiction. The works of American authors showed clearly that the stratigraphic importance of the Bryozoa is not inferior to that of any other group of fossils, whilst in the works of newer European authors the Palaeozoic Bryozoa were not only deprived of any significant rôle, but often even quite ignored. Owing to this, there arose a question whether the Palaeozoic Bryozoa have a universal distribution like, for instance, the Brachiopoda; or whether there is in North America a special Bryozoan fauna of stratigraphic importance locally, but absent from other parts of the globe. The study of the Siberian Palaeozoic Bryozoa showed a number of forms so far known only from North America, and this suggested that the apparent absence of “American” forms in the other parts of the globe is owing to the lack of intensive study given to the Palaeozoic Bryozoan faunas outside North America. Through the kindness of Dr. Nalivkin, who handed over to me several Bryozoa collected by him in the Middle Devonian of Germany, I was able to confirm this suggestion and I decided to examine, if possible, the existing collections of Palaeozoic Bryozoa of Europe. This appeared the more necessary because, although Palaeozoic Bryozoa were originally described by European authors, yet the species described by them were quite ignored by later American writers. Clearly then, if a comparison of the European with the American Palaeozoic Bryozoa were made, it would be likely that the trivial names of some American species would be replaced by the prior trivial names of European species. To make this comparison, I visited during the winter of 1928–1929 some of the most important museums of Europe, in which I could find either the type specimens of the European Bryozoa, or merely rich collections of topotypes. A revision of the material contained in the museums of Berlin, Munich, Bonn, Prague, Paris and London wholly confirmed my view, namely, that the “American” forms of Palaeozoic Bryozoa were universally distributed, but hitherto had been described and figured, often quite incorrectly, as distinct genera.

The greatest extent of the displacement of the earth's centre of gravity, and consequently the greatest rise of the ocean resulting from that displacement, would of course occur at the time of maximum glaciation, when the ice would be all on one hemisphere. But owing to the following circumstance, a still greater rise than that resulting from the displacement of the earth's centre of gravity alone might take place at some considerable time, either before or after the period of maximum glaciation.