It is a well-known fact that many islands in which there is no indigenous mammalian fauna, have been, and in some cases are still, inhabited by flightless birds, which are usually of considerable size. Mauritius and Rodriguez are good examples of such islands; in the former the dodo and aphanapteryx, in the latter the solitaire and erythromachus, existed at least as late as the beginning of the seventeenth century, when, owing to their inability to escape from their foes by flight, they fell easy victims to the crews of ships touching at the islands, and also to the various domestic animals, such as dogs, cats, and pigs, introduced by man.

From the first discovery of nitrate in these provinces it has been an interesting question as to what caused it to come into existence here in such abundance, and, as far as our present knowledge goes, nowhere else in the world in such quantities.

The proof which I gave in June, 1891, of the production of “rich phosphate” by enrichment of phosphatic chalk through the influence of the Tertiary deposit called “bief,” enabled us to foresee the existence of similar rich phosphate in the London Basin; since phosphatic chalk, analogous to that which I had described or discovered in Picardy, especially at Hardivilliers and Hallencourt, had been discovered by Mr. Strahan and described by him in an interesting paper “On a Phosphatic Chalk with Belemnitella quadrata.”

I Have recently been examining a series of specimens of Silurian slates from Scotland, specially collected because of the very intense shearing they have undergone. These and the accompanying other rocks are all crushed and torn out in a most remarkable degree, and the microscope shows how severely their constituents have been acted upon mechanically. Yet the crystalline and mineralogical development is seen to be but very moderate indeed. The micaceous mineral is all in one plane, and transverse sections, in polarized light, show that it is a felted, wavy, and puckered mass of interwoven flakelets, with chloritic substance intimately diffused among it, and still more apparent in separate little streaks and lenticles. The small amount of quartz present is rolled out into long, thin lenticles also. But the micaceous mineral itself is not at all far advanced, either as to size of its flakes or the nature of the mineral. It is still an impure, rather deeply-coloured greenish-yellow substance; not any of it has arrived at the stage of muscovite, and dehydration shows, in a remarkable manner, how very considerable its impurity still is. In its original condition, the slate gives sections which present a very uniform appearance under the microscope. The colour is the same all over, and the only indication of the presence of bands of varying nature is found in a very slight increase, in some layers, of the coarseness of grain and of the number of quartz-lenticles, and in the diffusion of the chloritic substance. But after heating the specimen, the effects seen in the sections are most striking. There are now many bands of different colours, yellow, red, greenish-brown, and brown, presenting very strong contrasts, and showing that noticeable differences in chemical composition must have existed in different thin layers of the seemingly homogeneous slate. Not only the interwoven chlorite, but also the micaceous mineral, has taken on these tints in very decided degrees. It must have been unusually impure. It has lost, after heating, nearly all its action in polarized light.

Some critics of my theory of the “Origin of Mountain Ranges” appear to have strangely lost sight of one of the essential principles upon which it rests. This seems to have arisen through their attention having been too much engrossed with what I have said on the subject of cubical or voluminal expansion.

The damage done to the land at the north end of Southwold by the “moderate gale” of May, 1895, has been described by Mr. J. Spiller. One result of this damage was the opening up of an interesting geological section along the base of the low cliffs, a short account of which I brought before the last meeting of the British Association at Ipswich.

After he had published his account of the geology of the Solomon Islands, Dr. Guppy was good enough to present to the Museum of Practical Geology a series of typical specimens showing the chief varieties of calcareous and argillaceous deposits met with in the islands. This collection includes rocks, washings, picked organisms, with a few microscopic slides, and it constitutes a series very valuable for reference.

The differences in chemical composition between spherulites and the matrices which contain them have been determined by many analysts. Michel Lévy, in a long and comprehensive paper, quotes some former analyses by Delesse, comparing them with his own, which they closely resembled. Lagario gives many analyses which are especially valuable, as he compares results from acid with those from intermediate and basic rocks, and finds a distinct difference between them. The relations of these results will be briefly considered at the end of the present paper.

The mineral riebeckite was first discovered by Professor T. G. Bonney in 1882, who, in a paper to the Royal Society describing a series of rock-specimens from the island of Socotra, noticed the occurrence in a granite of a mineral which, though presenting characters common to the hornblende group, he referred doubtfully to tourmaline.