In a recent number of the Geological Magazine, Dec. V, Vol. III, March, 1906, p. 120, there is an article by Prof. E. H. L. Schwarz which deals with the thickness of ice-caps during the various Glacial periods. At the outset Professor Schwarz takes the data furnished by Captain Scott's narrative of the voyage of the “Discovery” as the main support of the physicists' contention that an ice-sheet cannot exceed 1,600 feet in thickness.

The accompanying Plate represents a restoration of the skeleton of Hippopotamus minutus, Blain., which has lately been completed in the Geological Department of the British Museum (Nat. Hist.). The vertebral column and limbs are almost entirely composed of the actual bones, while the model of the skull has been built up according to the various parts obtained separately. No ribs were preserved in their entirety, neither were perfect specimens of the scapulæ or innominate bones procured. A large amount of material, including that from which the reconstruction of this skeleton has been made, was brought from Cyprus as the result of excavations carried on there by me at different times in 1901–2. The specimen was mounted and the skull modelled with great skill by Mr. P. O. Barlow, Formatore in the British Museum (Nat. Hist.).

We are glad to intróduce to our readers a portrait and some account of the life-work of the distinguished Palæontologist to the Geological Survey of Canada, who has now held the office for thirty years.

Some years since Mr. Reginald M. Brydone, F.G.S., placed in my hands a number of fossil Cirripedes from the Chalk of Trimmingham, Norfolk, with the request that I would describe them. Others have lately been sent to me by Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., from his private collection and from the Geological Survey Museum; also a set of Chalk Lepadidæ from Dr. Arthur Rowe, F.G.S., of Margate, collected by him in the vicinity of Norwich. I now take up the study of these too long neglected specimens.

It requires but little imagination to conceive that a very slight subsidence of the country in North Wales lying between the Vale of Clwydd and the estuary of the River Dee would convert it into a peninsula consistingof Carboniferous rocks skirting to the north, and to the east a strip of Silurian ground. The backbone of this peninsula is composed of Lower Carboniferous rocks, forming the high range which starts from the bold cliffs that border the sandy flats of the north shore of Flint from Dyserth to Talacre. Stretching southwards by way of Halkyn Mountain, Moel Findeg, Nerquis Mountain to Minera and Llangollen, this range, in the main, forms ani anticline, off whose eastern flanks the higher divisions of the Carboniferous system dip in natural sequence towards the River Dee.

Among the great body of geologists, who are justly entitled by their work in this field of science to rank as “knights- commanders of the hammer,” there is no one more distinguished, as well for his active services as for the geniality of his disposition and his bonhomie, than the amiable and accomplished occupant of the Woodwardian Chair of Geology in the University of Cambridge, Professor T. McKenny Hughes.

The subject of this address is a brief acount of the succession, thickness, and geological history of the South African, and more especially of the Transvaal, formations. The information necessary for such an account is of course very incomplete, but in broad outline the succession is now known, and some speculation as to the physical conditions that prevailed during the building up of the region may perhaps be permitted. I propose to deal with the period of the geological history of this country that came to an end with the close of Karroo times. The Karroo period ends with the Stormberg rocks (Rhæitic), and since that time South Africa has, with the exception of a small coastal area, been a land surface, and the rocks have consequently been exposed uninterruptedly to the forces of denudation.

Last Summer, when I travelled in South Africa with the British Association, I examined the diamantiferous gravels on the Vaal River near Kimberley. During this visit Mr. Krumbelt, apothecary in Barkly West, had the kindness to give me three fossil teeth which he had found in the local gravels. Nos. 1 and 2 were obtained from the so-called breakwater workings of the river-side, while No. 3 was found in the Waldeck Plant in the higher terrace of gravels at an elevation of 60 to 80 feet. The state of preservation of all these teeth is that of real fossil remains.

If Lamarck allowed his brilliant faculty of generalisation to lead him far astray in his opinions regarding the origin of rocks, he bad formed a saner judgment on the causes that have developed the present terrestrial topography. The first chapter of the “Hydrogéologie ” is devoted to a consideration of the natural results that arise from the circulation of water over the surface of the land. This subject, he remarks, affords less scope than any other for the exercise of the imagination in framing hypotheses, for it can be studied on a basis of facts which are generally familiar. Though the question required to be considered in his treatise and was capable of easy solution, yet it seemed to him to be novel, at least from a general point of view, and to have been previously neglected by physicists and naturalists. He appears to have formed his conclusions regarding it independently, and to have been unaware how far he had been anticipated by previous observers. It is singularthat he makes no allusion to the work of his distinguished fellow-countryman Desmarest, who some thirty years previously had demonstrated, from a prolouged and minute investigation of the volcanic history of Auvergne, that the valleys of that region have been excavated by the streams which flow in them. He does not refer to the enunciation of the same doctrine by De Saussure a few years later in regard to the valleys of the Alps, nor to the clear presentation of similar views by Hutton, whose system had been expounded to French readers by Desmarest. But though he was mistaken in supposing that the doctrine was novel, Lamarck was not surpassed by any of his predecessors in the firmness with which he espoused it, and in the clearness with which he presented it to the world.

When the “Alliance Francaise” did me the honour of inviting me to give an address on this interesting occasion, the choice of an appropriate subject of discourse presented at first some little difficulty. On the one hand, as a representative of science in the “Alliance Franco—Britannique,” it appeared to be incumbent upon me to choose some topic of a scientific kind, and by preference one which would in some way link our two countries together in common bonds of association. On the other hand, it was obviously inadvisable that the theme should be of a technical character which would be little suited for a general audience. After some reflection I decided to present for your consideration a brief account of two remarkable volumes, both of which, dealing with geological questions, appeared in the year 1802, the one in Paris, the other in Edinburgh. Though the political sympathies which for so many generations had linked France and Scotland in a friendly alliance had fallen somewhat into abeyance by the beginning of last century, the two nations still continued to be drawn to each other in the realms of culture by a common ardour in the prosecution of science and philosophy, and by the mutual reaction which, in these great domains of human thought, they exerted on each other.

Notwithstanding all that has been written concerning the Keisley Limestone, its exact relations with the older Dufton Shales have never been clearly ascertained. I accordingly devoted a few days of the Easter vacation to the study of these relations in company with Messrs. W. G. Fearnsides, R. H. Rastall, and T. O. Bosworth, whose help I gratefully acknowledge.

Before proceeding to the description of new species it may perhaps be well to make a few remarks on the classification of the Cretaceous Polyzoa and in particular of the Cheilostomata, the suborder which embraces all the species I propose to describe.

The corals described in this report were collected by members of the Egyptian Geological Survey, and were sent to London in September, 1899. I then examined most of the specimens, and submitted a preliminary report to the effect that they belong to three horizons:—

A Recent visit to Portugal has given me an opportunity of seeing the geological features of the neighbourhood of Lisbon and the Lower Tagus; and though of a somewhat cursory nature I venture to bring them before the Society, being supplemented by reference to the investigations of previous observers, and a study of the excellent geological maps which are in the library of this Society. I make no pretension to be an original explorer, but I hope to be able to show that there is a very interesting physical history, not hitherto written so far as I am able to discover, bringing down the account of the changes which have taken place from the Cretaceous period to the Recent, or Quaternary, epoch.

As representing the first fossils yet recorded from Singapore, these specimens are of considerable interest. They principally consist of marine Lamellibranch remains accompanied by an obscure indeterminable Gasteropod, and a few fragmentary terrestrial plants. Their condition, however, as casts and impressions renders them most difficult to work out satisfactorily, more especially the shells where only external features of the valves are available for study. Some of the specimens, however, retain certain points of structure or contour which appear to have an important bearing on their probable geological age. The association of land and marine organisms would at once suggest an estuarine or lagoon origin for the beds containing them, more especially as the mollusca belong to genera or families which may be regarded as of shallow-water habit, whilst the plant-remains might be accounted for by the close proximity of land or the transporting agency of river action. Among the shells, that referred to Goniomya is of chief interest, since it belongs almost exclusively to the Mesozoic period, being particularly characteristic of Jurassic rocks and of much rarer occurrence in deposits of Cretaceous age.

Mr. R. M. Brydone's account of the masses of chalk exposed on the Norfolk coast near Trimingham, published in this Magazine during the first three months of the present year, is a valuable record of facts revealed by the encroachments of the sea, but it raises questions of a general nature, on which I should at once have commented, had I not preferred to wait until I could again examine the sections. This was done in company with the Rev. E. Hill during Easter week, when we found that even since the middle of last October (the date of Mr. Brydone's latest photograph) the destruction had been considerable.

For many years it has been known that Ichthyosaurus was a viviparous reptile, but until quite recently the British Museum has not possessed a specimen with contained embryos. This deficiency has now been supplied by the acquisition of two fine skeletons, which are worthy of special notice.

Distribution.—“Santonian”: Berak el Gazal, near Abu Roash (Fourtau). “Eocene”: Abu Roash district. L 1379. Coll. H. J. L. Beadnell, Esq. A young broken specimen, east end of the Cretaceous area, near Abu Roash village. I 3796. Coll. H. J. L. Beadnell, Esq.

The fossil or sub-fossil remains to which I propose to devote this short paper were procured from a cave-deposit in East Crete by Miss Dorothea M. A. Bate, whose valuable work among the Pleistocene Mammalia in Crete is so well known.

The corries and tarns of the Comeragh Mountains have received but scanty attention at the hands of geologists. In the Memoir of the Geological Survey dealing with this portion of co. Waterford their position and height are mentioned, and reference is made to some of the glacial phenomena in their immediate neighbourhood, but no connected description of the whole group of corries is given. Kinahan, in his “Geology of Ireland” (1878), pp. 245, 310, refers briefly to them, and inclines to the view that they were cut out by the action of the sea on the flanks of the mountains, but that the rock-basins which they frequently contain were excavated by small glaciers. The position of the corries, chiefly on the north and east sides of these mountains, as elsewhere in Ireland, is attributed by him to the preservative action of the ice and snow, which would not melt in them so rapidly (owing to their colder aspect) as on the southern and western slopes, where the corries have been obliterated by denudation effected by ordinary subaerial agents. Carvill Lewis refers to the glaciation of the Comeragh Mountains in several places, remarking that they “show signs of glaciation on their north-east side as high as 1,000 feet, up to which height they are rounded off and drift occurs. Above this they are jagged and contain cwms, glacial lakes, and other evidences of small local glaciers.”