The number of eminent living geologists surviving since the days of De la Beohe and Ramsay and the beginnings of the Geological Survey must indeed be very few, but in Dr. A. R. C. Selvvyn, the subject of this brief notice, we have a living illustration of one of those active and energetic early workers whose labours have extended from Britain to Australia and Canada, and who, after half a century of active service in the field, is now enjoying his well-merited repose in British Columbia, “the land of the far West.”

Since 1877, when I discovered the Tertiary Mammalian beds of Santa Cruz, in Patagonia, I have been looking for proofs of the ancient connection between the new uplifted lands of the southern part of the American continent and the other lands of the Southern Hemisphere—Africa and Australia. During my subsequent travels in the interior of the Argentine Republic, including Patagonia, my interest in that connection has been increasing, and I have discovered additional evidence, which showed me the former greater extension to the east, in comparatively modern times, of the actual existing lands.

In offering a few remarks on a subject which belongs, in the first instance, to the province of physical geography, it will be necessary forme to point out certain hydrographical details, whilst, endeavouring to deduce from these details conclusions having a geological bearing. Oceanography is almost a science in itself, especially if we regard it from a geological point of view, as something more than a mere description of water-spaces and soundings. Ever since the days when the deep oceans were first explored for the purpose of laying the telegraph cables some of the leading facts were made known, and have since become familiar to all students of physical geography.

A Mongst the fossils collected from the Pendleside Limestone of Butterhaw Knoll, Cracoe, Yorkshire,inwhich Cyphaspis acanthina. (Coignou) was discovered a few years ago, there are in the Woodwardian Museum a few specimens of a species of Phillipsia, which were foundin1889 by Professor Hughes' same geological party. My attention has been recently directed to them, and it has become evident, after a careful examination, that they do not belong to any of the hitherto described species of this genus.

After a term of work extending over nearly half a century, Mr. Howell, the Director of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, has retired from the public service. It is not often that a man who has only just reached the age-limit of 65 is able to look back on such a lengthened period of official work. No member of the Geological Survey has before attained such a record. Even Mr. Selwyn, whose portrait we gave in our February Number, had reached the age of 70 when he had nearly completed his fiftieth year of work on the Geological Surveys of Great Britain, Victoria, and Canada.

The tooth figured in the accompanying plate was originally noticed by me in this Magazine thirty years ago, and was more fully described by me a year later in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1870, p. 507.

Quiting the more northern parts of the great Atlantic depression, we have next to consider an extensive water-space of a much shallower character. Here the volcanic masses of Iceland and the Fseroes with their submarine attachments have produced a marked effect on the depths of the ocean. The Norwegian Atlantic connects with the main Atlantic by three straits, whose central channels present the following depths at their shallowest:—

India, the present home of one of the two types of existing elephants (Elephas Indicus), has also yielded abundant evidence of numerous extinct forms of this animal; two species of Dinotherium, eight species of Mastodon, and seven species of extinct elephants being recorded from the Miocene and Pliocene formations of that great continent.

The first account of tbe geology of Socotra we owe to Lieutenant J. R. Wellsted, who compiled the Admiralty chart and map, and in 1835 described the island in a detailed memoir, in which he showed that it consists of a mass of granite capped by limestones. Nothing material was added to this description until 1883, when Professor Bonney published his account of the extensive rock collection made by Professor J. B. Balfour during a six weeks' visit to the island in February and March, 1879. Professor Bonney's study of the rock specimens enables him to prove that Socotra consists of a block of Archean rocks covered in places by massive limestones, which, on the evidence of their foraminifera, Professor T. R. Jones suggested were probably of Miocene age

I am greatly indebted to Mr. F. Spry for bringing to my knowledge some extremely interesting Upper Silurian fossils collected by him with great care and diligence from the tunnels excavated through the rocks underlying Melbourne during the progress of the new great drainage works for the city, carried out by the Metropolitan Board of Works. The age of the strata containing these fossils was originally determined by me for Selwyn's Geological Survey Maps of Victoria.

The members of Mr. E. A. FitzGrerald's expedition to the Chilian. Andesin1896–7 made a rather large collection of rock specimens from the higher regions, which has been entrusted to me for examination. The descriptions will be published in Mr. FitzGerald's forthcoming book, but as two are exceptionally interesting I wish them to appear in the Geological Magazine.

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.

The classification of the Palæozoic starfishes has long been in chaos. The earlier palæontologists, who founded most of the known genera, made no attempt at a general classification or to indicate the relations between the Palæozoic and existing representatives of the Asteroidea. The first step towards progress was Bronn's division of the extinct genera into three groups—the Ophiurasteriæ (which may be left out of account as Ophiuroidea), the Encrinasteriæ, and the Asterias veræ.

Though the kind intervention of Professor H. G. Seeley, F.R.S., some few years since, Mr. Percy Hawkins was induced to present to the Geological Department of the British Museum a slab of Old Red Sandstone from Llanvaches, nearly midway between Caerleon and Chepstow, Monmouthshire, containing some excellent impressions of Archanodon Jukesi.

The subclass Dinosauria, as known to-day, I have divided into three orders: the Theropoda, or carnivorous forms; the Sauropoda, or herbivorous quadrupedal forms; and the Predentata, also herbivorous, and including several suborders, namely, the Stegosauria and Ceratopsia, both quadrupedal, and the Ornithopoda, containing bipedal bird-like reptiles.

If the paper on the recent geology of Sweden which has already appeared in the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE is sound in argument (and I have not met anyone yet who has answered it), it follows that the views ordinarily current in regard to the glacial geology of Northern Europe will have to be greatly modified. Scandinavia is confessedly the great focus and centre of the phenomena which have been interpreted as glacial.

The area occupied by Lower Palæozoic rocks in Victoria is an extensive one, and is pretty equally divided between Ordovician and Silurian, the part occupied by Cambrian being small. According to Dr. A. R. C. Selwyn, formerly Director of the Geological Survey of the Colony, the total area amounts to somewhere about 30,000 square miles in extent, and although in this estimate he included all areas occupied by these rocks provided the cover was not more than. 350 feet in thickness, it will still leave us with a large extent of country over which graptolites may be found.

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 many places in Western Norway we find a lake separated from a fjord by a mile or so of sand and gravel. Looking from the fjord, we see in such a case a series of step terraces, with possibly a high mound at the back, forming a dam at the end of the lake.

In the September number of the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE for 1898, Mr. J. S. Flett, B.Sc, describes, at p. 388, the occurrence of Allanite in the granite of Fell Hill, Cree Town, Kirkcudbrightshire, and in a biotite gneiss in Sunday, one of the Orkney Islands.