The “Pennystone Ironstone” Nodules of the Coalbrook-dale Coal-field have long been celebrated for their fossil contents yielding, when split open, impressions of Fern-leaves, fruits of Lepidodendron, King-crabs, and the more rare remains of Insects.

Of all the “troubles” that afflict the Ironstone miner, few are more perplexing than those known as “wants.” It sometimes happens that in the course of the working a “face” is being carried forward into the ironstone seam, when the miner finds that he has taken out what is apparently the last piece of “stone,” and looks with astonishment at “the blaise where the stone should be.”

The fossils of the volcanic Islands of the Atlantic Ocean, St. Helena, Madeira, Teneriffe, and Iceland, have a specialinterest, as giving dates relative to the supposed Atlantic Continent. The fossil land-shells of St. Helena and Madeira appear to belong to a period corresponding to the Crag-formation of England. The marine fossils of the Canaries, on the contrary, belong to a somewhat more ancient period.

Although the Mendip Hills have received a large share of attention from geologists since the beginning of the present century, and particularly from Buckland and Conybeare, Weaver, De la Beche, Ramsay, and Moore, there are still many points of great interest that require to be worked out.

The paper of Mr. Hull, “On the General Relations of the Drift Deposits of Ireland to those of Great Britain,” in the July number of the Geological Magazine, induces me to recur to one by myself on the Sequence of the Glacial Beds, Vol. VII p. 17 of the same Magazine.

In bringing the last of a long series of papers on the Surface Drifts of the Lake District of Cumberland and Westmoreland to a close, Mr. Mackintosh sums up the general results at which he has arrived. All will agree with the first of his conclusions, “that land-ice may have planed, smoothed, polished, and striated rock surfaces, and pushed loose débris forward….” But I cannot see his reason for adding, “to the nearest protected situations,” for one would expect to find a terminal moraine at the open entrance of a valley, on a plain, or even on what can be proved to have been a true sea-bottom.