The Solway Firth is the only important ria on the western coast of 1 Scotland; it has a complex history, for denudation and earthmovements of several different dates have contributed to its formation. Uncertainty as to the essential structure of the Solway valley at present renders doubtful its position in the valley system of Southern Scotland. The Solway—Carlisle basin is generally represented as occupying a synclinal between the Lower Palaeozoic hills of the Lake District and of the Southern Uplands of Scotland. Thus the sections by E. W. Binney (1865, p. 369, ref. p. 249) and Mr. T. V. Holmes (1889, p. 247, and 1899, pp. 22, 40) represent the valley of the Solway and its eastern continuation as lying along a synclinal and resting on a great thickness of Triassic rocks. The axis of the synclinal is marked by the Lias which occurs to the west of Carlisle. The Solway-Carlisle basin cannot, however, have such a simple synclinal structure, for Carboniferous rocks occur at the surface near the northern shore of the Eastern Solway. This fact is shown by a boring for coal made in 1794 in an old quarry beside the Kirtle Water at Redkirk Mill, 1£ miles to the south-west of Gretna Green. The bore journal was published in Singer's Agricultural Survey of the County of Dumfries, 1812, pp. 670-3 ; and as that book is scarce and the bore important the record may be conveniently reprinted.

Although much has been written upon the palæontology of the Suffolk box-stones, no description appears hitherto to have been published of the petrology of these boulders. This is the more curious on account of the light it might throw upon the disputed question of their source, no similar sandstone having yet been recognized with certainty in situ. The most recent account of the molluscan fauna is by my friend Mr. Alfred Bell. In a preliminary paper he has given a list of sixty-three species (excluding cetacean bones, teeth, crustaceans, etc.), about twelve new species and varieties being described. Mr. Bell has now kindly let me see in advance the MS. of a revised list of Mollusca (seventy-six species), much new box-stone material having been obtained in the last few years. As a result of recent work, he considers the affinities of the fauna to be rather with the Rupelian (Continental Oligocene) than with the Bolderian or Diestian, as he formerly thought. Mr. Clement Reid, in The Pliocene Deposits of Britain (Mem. Geol. Survey, 1890), considered the box-stones to be of about the same age as the Diestian Beds, but Mr. F. W. Harmer has, in later publications, been inclined to consider them to be rather older and of very early Pliocene age.

The facts concerning the Curvature of the Subvective Grooves have been summarized in Study IV(1914, p. 122). They show that no distinction can be drawn in this respect between. Edrioasteroidea and Cystidea Diploporita, as some have pretended.

This remarkable rock occurs as a marginal phase of the granulitic albite granites which are found between Noqui and kilometre 16 on the road to San Salvador. In the hand-specimen it shows a finegrained slightly foliated structure with a characteristic pepper and salt appearance, due to the sprinkling of lustrous black plates of riebeckite among iron-stained granular crystals of quartz and felspar. A few small porphyritic crystals of orthoclase are embedded in the main mass of the rock, making up approximately 15 per cent of the whole.

In the very interesting paper by Mr. Arthur Holmes on “Rradio-activity and the Earth's Thermal History”, in the Geological Magazine for February and March, it is assumed that in Archæan times there was “a widespread molten condition at no very great depth” below the earth's surface, and in the final conclusions the statement is made that “geological and other evidence points favourably to the traditional view that the earth's crust was initially in a molten state”. The results of recent work on the Archæan of Canada do not bear out this traditional view of the conditions of the earth's earliest known geological period, and it may not be amiss to suggest some points that decidedly conflict with it.

In his report on “The Coal Resources of the East Africa Protectorate” published in the Twelfth International Geological Congress‘ The Coal Resources of the World (vol. ii, p. 381), Dr. J. W. Evans discusses evidence bearing on the existence of coal in the Taru Grits, which form the lowest member of the coastal series of sediments in the East Africa Protectorate. Referring to a report of mine, he remarks that I believe them to be of Karroo age, and then says, “E. Fraas, who subsequently made a brief examination of the line of railway, and whose account of the geology of the region differs in many respects from that of Maufe, refers them to the Middle Dogger (Inferior Oolite).”