Last year, while on an excursion to Scotland, I visited the Ardnamurchan peninsula, which, as is well known, consists to a great extent of rocks belonging to the gabbro family. On the road leading from the little village of Kilhoan, opposite the Isle of Mull, on the north coast, a small quarry has been opened for road-metal, which shows an exquisite section of a granophyre dyke intrusive in a dark and almost black fine-grained rock, which the microscopic examination proved to be a gabbro. This is, therefore, a similar occurrence to that of Barnavave, Carlingford, Ireland, which has been admirably described by Professor Sollas, and also that of Strath in the Isle of Skye, of which Mr. Harker has given us a detailed account. As occurrences of this kind seem to be rather rare and, as far as I am aware, hitherto not known from Ardnamurchan, I may be excused for calling your attention to the following short description of these rocks, although there is but little to be added to the results attained by the skilful researches of the above-mentioned authors, and it only shows again that on Ardnamurchan we are to expect very nearly the same geological phenomena as in the adjacent islands, in particular in Skye and Rum.

Stromatolites found in Karagwe-Ankolean rocks on the Tanganyika-Uganda border occur in siliceous beds associated with cherty and ferruginous breccia without trace of calcareous material. Somewhat similar conditions prevail in beds of the Singo Series of Uganda from which Collenia-type structures have been recorded. Little stratigraphical value can be ascribed to the structures, but they are significant in pointing to the replacement character of some fine-grained siliceous beds which may explain the scarcity of limestone in the Pre-Cambrian sequence of Uganda.

In presenting a portrait and offering to the readers of the Geological Magazine a brief memoir of Dr. Arthur Smith Woodward, my namesake and successor in the Geological Department of the British Museum (Natural History), I feel that no apology is needed, inasmuch as every lover of our science will be glad to possess a record of one of its leading men whom he may have met already, and known generally, but may wish for a more personal acquaintance, which this sketch is intended to furnish.

Henry Woodward.

As none of the figures hitherto given of the genus Eophyton show either its internal structure, or articulations of its stems, and as I am in possession of a specimen from the Lower Arenig Rocks, of Ramsey Island, near St. David's, which resembles in some respects the Eophyton Linnœanum Torell, but which shows both articulations of the stem, and an internal vascular structure, a description of the species may probably be useful, and may tend to elucidate the true nature of Eophyton, concerning which so much doubt seems to exist at present.

The descriptions of two of the species enumerated in my paper on the Tertiary Fossils of the West Indies having been accidentally omitted, the defect is now supplied.

A small mass consisting of three intrusions of fine-textured acid rocks occurs within the basaltic agglomerates of the Kilchrist Vent of Tertiary age. One of the intrusions comprises flow-layered rhyolite and ignimbrite. It is thought that the rock-types represent two distinctive eruptive waves. A form of ovoidal structure not seen elsewhere in the Kilchrist area occurs in another rhyolite intrusion.

A paper by Mr. J. Lomas on “Desert Conditions and the Origin of the British Trias” appeared last year in the Proceedings of the Livepool Geological Society, and was reprinted, with some slight abridgement, in the November and December numbers of this Magazine. Valuable and suggestive as it is, I venture to think that its author, as is not unfrequent with enthusiastic advocates, is attempting to prove too much. I have more than once expressed my belief that the pebble beds of the Bunter, perhaps also its Upper and Lower Sandstones, were deposited on a lowland by mountain-fed rivers, and think it very probable that this lowland, in consequence of its temperature rather extreme, as is the case in Turkestan and parts of Persia; the occasional wind-worn sands being due to the one cause and the angular breccias to the other. But I think the Keuper Marls, on the whole, aqueous rather than æolian in origin, and the Lower Keuper Sandstones, with the Waterstones, indicative of the gradual setting in of inland sea conditions. From time to time, before the salt lake attained its greatest dimensions, the wind might blow the lowland dust into dunes or carry it away from the shore till much of it settled down beneath the water, but I still think that a large part of the material, which now forms the red marl, was brought down as river mud to this magnified Dead Sea, by the streams which had formerly transported sand and pebbles. In regard to this, however, we cannot at present speak dogmatically. More study is needed of the constituents of the Keuper Marl, of fluviatile, lacustrine, and even marine muds, as well as of the lighter æolian deposits, before we can determine what parts wind and water have respectively taken in making this member of the Trias. Here, however, I may remark that neither Professor Watts nor Mr. Walcot Gibson was the first to observe that in the Charnwood Forest region the Keuper fills up hollows in the older rocks.

In Plate 1 of professor Owen's invaluable memoir on the Archæopteryx (Phil. Trans. 1863) the fifth vertebra behind the Acetabula is seized upon as the first of the caudal series. In Pl. 3, fig. 5, of the same memoir, we have the delineation of a young Ostrich’s pelvis; and in that figure the first post-femoral joint is marked as the commencement of the true tail; eight such joints being, even in the young bird, embraced by the posterior processes of the iliac bones.

The limestone hills of the Kinta Valley, standing up with white cliff faces from an almost level plain, form a prominent and picturesque feature of this prolific tinfield, and attract attention and present a varying scene as viewed from different points in the valley of the Kinta River. Their mode of origin has been the subject of marked divergence of opinion amongst geologists acquainted with them, as has also their age in relation to the series of metamorphic sediments found in the same valley.

The triangular non-perforated areas lying on each side of the glabella and bounded in front and laterally by the fringe are usually described as the cheeks and distinct from the fringe, as if they alone corresponded to the fixed cheeks of the Opisthoparia and Proparia, or even included also the free cheeks of these orders. But if the facial suture is marginal, and if the lower plate of the fringe is considered to represent the free-cheeks, as Beecher maintained, the upper plate of the fringe must be regarded as merely a modified marginal portion of the fixed cheeks, so that the triangular areas within the fringe would only constitute the inner part of the fixed cheeks.

After a recent visit to Trinidad I am led to add my testimony to that of the numerous observers, who for more than a hundred years have written concerning this remarkable phenomenon.

To the earthquake that ruined Lisbon on November 1, 1755, we may trace the great interest in the study of earthquakes which marks the middle of the eighteenth century, though valuable accounts of previous earthquakes had already appeared in the pages of the Philosophical Transactions. During the following year the Royal Society paid the same close attention to this earthquake that it did more than a century later to those of the eruption of Krakatoa. In 1757 an anonymous editor published The History and Philosophy of Earthquakes, in which he gave abstracts of ten memoirs by the “best writers on the subject”—Hooke, Woodward, Buffon, and Stukeley among them—followed by a summary of the observations on the Lisbon earthquake that had been communicated to the Royal Society. These are the principal sources on which Michell depended when he wrote his memoir on the cause and phenomena of earthquakes.

The occurrence of “Sarsen-stones,” or blocks of so-called Druid sandstone, has not, I believe, been generally noticed in this locality, and their position may be of interest to some of your readers, more especially as the extensive working both for Brick-earth and Chalk have obliterated many of the interesting sections for which the pits were celebrated. Grays is well known both for its fine chalk-pits and extensive brick-earth deposits, the latter containing numerous remians of fossil mammalia, associated with land and fresh water mollusca. The sarsen-stones (of which some may be still seen lying about the large chalk-pit), I have noticed during the progress of the workings as occurring on the upper surface of a bed of disturbed chalk, above the solid chalk, and covered by a blackish or carbonaceous clay containing freshwater shells.