As Dr. Anton Fritsch of Prague has brought the relics of Permian animals (Sauria and Fishes) from the Gas-coal of Nürschan and from the “Schwarte,” near Rakonitz, before the Meeting of the British Association at Glasgow in September last, it will certainly not be without interest, to give some geological and historical notes on this most important occurrence, and I may, I trust, be allowed to do so in the Geological Magazine.

In the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society (vol. xxxiii. p. 142) is an important paper by Mr. Helland, on Fjords, Lakes, and Cirques in Norway and Greenland. In this he notices a theory of mine on the formation of cirques which was published in the same journal (vol. xxvii. p. 312). As I mentioned in a note attached to his paper, he somewhat misunderstands me, supposing apparently that I describe only cirques of a small size,—the fact being, that, so far as I know, the Alpine cirques are quite commensurate with those of Norway. This, however, is of slight importance. My present purpose is to give reasons why, after further observations in the Alps and Pyrenees, and even in the British Isles, I still prefer the explanation then advanced, that the cirques are mainly produced by the combined erosive action of streamlets, to the one given by Mr. Helland, that a cirque is a result of glacial action.

During a recent excursion into Teesdale I paid a visit to certain Mica trap-dykes discovered by my friend Mr. W. Gunn, and to a section of the Carboniferous beds below the Whin Sill of Falcon Clints, near Caldron Snout, which suggested the question whether there is not a base to the Carboniferous beds in that part of Teesdale.

There is a homely saying, “Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.” Mr. Goodchild, with that ingenuity for which he is remarkable, has written an elaborate paper to prove that the terraces of the Yorkshire Limestone dales are all the work of the Great Ice Sheet. This paper will doubtless call forth a number of equally elaborate answers: and this is well. But if Mr. Goodchild has a fine goose fattened on the Limestone terraces of Wensleydale, I have an equally fine gander reared on Gritstone terraces in Derbyshire: and if a frozen sauce of regelated snow from wintry storms of the Great Ice Age is good for one, it is equally good for the other. Dropping metaphor, there is no difference between terraces, mainly of limestone, in Wensleydale, and other terraces, chiefly of grit, that are found over all the Millstone Grit area of South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, saving that while limestone predominates in the one, beds of grit do in the other.

The day on which I arrived at Tomsk, which was the 6th of October, I bought a small tarantass, and next morning I started, with some who had been fellow-passengers on the steamer, en route for Irkutsk. There were four conveyances between three parties, one of them being used exclusively for baggage. As each of these always needed three horses, and sometimes four, we often had difficulties at the post-station, where the post-master seemed disinclined to allow such a sudden draft being made upon his stables. Luckily my friends were high officials, and travelling on Government service, and their wants had from necessity to be supplied. My carriage being included with the rest, I went along comfortably and without delay, which would most certainly have occurred had I been alone. Before we were fairly outside Tomsk we ascended what I had, when at a distance, mistaken for hills, but which now appeared to be only a scarp-like face of a plateau, and we were soon upon a dusty road bounded by a low plantation of birch. Now and then we plunged down and over a small water-course, our momentum always carrying us some distance up the other side. Everywhere the country appeared as if it were an alluvial expanse; but in the vicinity I think there must have been some beds of rock, because everywhere along the road stone was being used as a material to repair it. This was yellow, argillaceous, and somewhat slaty in its character, perhaps having come from some of the Coal-measures which I believe exist in the vicinity of Tomsk.

Sp. Chars.—Tooth bidentioulated with a re-entering angle between the denticles; sides sloping down to the lateral angles; anterior profile convex; posterior profile concave. The most prominent portion of the anterior surface is at the centre of the inferior margin of the crown, where it becomes bowed-out, whence the surface gradually recedes to the cutting edge of the crown on the one hand, and more rapidly towards the root on the other.

Baron Ettingshausen has forwarded to me from Graz a series of papers, relating more especially to the Fossil Floras of the Tertiary Periods. We have been made familiar with these mainly through the translations of the works of Heer, Unger, and De La Harpe; but to most of the readers of this Journal the work and opinions of other continental palaeontologists, such as Ettingshausen, Massalongo, and Saporta, are unknown. It may, therefore, not be out of place, pending the contemplated publication by the Palseonto-graphical Society of a monograph on the British Fossil Eocene Flora, to give in the GeologicalMagazine a brief analysis of their theories.

On the 6th March, 1874, I communicated a paper on the “Geology of the Neighbourhood of Nottingham” to the Geologists' Association, which was subsequently printed in extenso in their Proceedings. Up to that time I believe the definition laid down by the Government Survey, and imported into text-books, of the distinction between the so-called Permian and the New Red Sandstone formations had not been called in question very prominently. Like other students of geology, I myself accepted in good faith the dictum as to a great break existing between the two formations, indicating, of course, an enormous period of time.

The topic of this paper is suggested by a somewhat extended practical study of the fossils of North America. A comparison of these forms with our European faunas will, I think, throw some light upon migration, and upon the correlation of strata.

At the London Meeting of the North of England Institute of Mining Engineers last June, I read a paper in which I ventured to put forward a scheme of classification of the Carboniferous rocks of Northumberland which I believed to be both a natural and a convenient one.

The following is an abstract of another of the papers forwarded to me from Graz, to which I alluded in the April Number of the GeologicalMagazine. The author first states that the opinion he had formed, that all the Floras of the present time were represented in the Tertiary Flora of Europe, has been still more confirmed by later researches, and then enters upon his more immediate subject.

The rock Lherzolite has been described by Prof. Zirkel in his valuable Beiträge zur Geologischen Kentniss der Pyrenäen (Zeitschrift der Deutsch. Geol. Gesel., vol. xix. p. 68), but is generally passed over with the briefest mention or entirely omitted in English works on Geology. Even in Cotta's “Rocks Classified and Described” it is barely noticed, and the word is left out in the index. On this account, and seeing that, so far as I am aware, no description of its microscopic structure has yet been published, a notice, embodying the results of Prof. Zirkel's paper, and of a brief visit of my own to this not very accessible locality, may be useful to students.

In May last I had the honour of laying before the Geological Society a description of all the known British Cretaceous Patellidæ and patelloid Gasteropoda. Since then the well-known collector, Griffiths, of Folkestone, has forwarded to me a new limpet from Hythe, which appears to belong to the genus Hipponyx. The finding of a shell of this genus is remarkable, as hitherto the shelly bases were the only indications of the existence of Hipponyx in Cretaceous rocks in England, whilst Capulus Dunkerianus, d'Orb., was the only shell on the Continent, of this age, which could be referred to the genus.