Precambrian rocks throughout most of the southern part of the Bighorn Mountains, Wyoming, are dominated by a biotite-bearing plagioclase–quartz gneiss containing hornblende-rich or microcline-rich layers locally. Compositional and/or optical data are presented for plagioclase, biotite, and hornblende as well as optical and X-ray data for microcline and preliminary morphologic data for zircon in the gneiss. These data, supplemented by field and petrographic observations, suggest that the gneiss was formed under conditions of the low amphibolite facies, that late-occurring potash metasomatism accompanied the metamorphism, and that the gneiss was derived from a relatively chemically uniform parent rock.

During the course of a systematic investigation of the drifts of Flamborough Head, I have somewhat unexpectedly come across a fragment of marine Arctic beds enclosed in Boulder-clay, similar to those which form the well-known fossiliferous deposits of Bridlington and Dimlington; and as this occurs under very different conditions from those already described, it adds materially to our knowledge of the beds, and illustrates more clearly their origin.

In England the Great Oolite of Minchinhampton contains the greater number of species belonging to this peculiar group of Haliotidœ. Morris and Lycett (Great Oolite Mollusca, p. 80) give a full and interesting diagnosis of the genus, which has oniy one representative in the Corallian beds of Yorkshire. D'Orbigny figures half a dozen species of Troehotoma from the Corallian of France, and Buvignier gives three from the Coral Rag of the Meuse. None are quoted by Be Loriol from the Séquanien of Boulogne.

II. (8) Kent.—1862. Mr. W. H. Bensted, in the Geologist, vol. v (1862), pp. 449, 450, states: “The Druid Sandstone, of which Kit's Coty House, Stonehenge, and many other Druidical remains are composed, is found scattered in great blocks over the surface of the Chalk Hills, or buried superficially in beds of clay retained in the hollows on the summits of the escarpments.” These stones, he added, are the same as the Greywethers of Berks and Wilts; and are occasionally pebbly, like the Hertfordshire Puddingstones.

The petrography of the Plateau Deposits has been determined. They yield species both of local origin and of the general Haldon types.

The kyanite and staurolite present have been derived from the north.

The planation of the limestones was initiated during the Cretaceous period.

The raised beaches are of slightly different types, the Thatcher raised beach being later. They furnish evidence of a former greater thickness of the Plateau Deposits.

Modern beach deposits furnish some evidence of the distributive powers of certain minerals, and point to the existence of Triassic and Cretaceous sediments outside the Bay.

It is proposed in the present paper to discuss certain micrometric methods applicable to the minerals of sedimentary rocks and to suggest how their graphical study may be used for the elucidation of certain problems in sedimentary petrology. The examples used are taken chiefly from the Triassic and Jurassic rocks of Yorkshire as described in Part I.1

The remains of the genus Spermophilus have been so rarely found in Britain that an account of another example could not but be of interest to geologists; but the specimen described below is especially noteworthy as it has been obtained from a deposit only recently discovered, and from which no vertebrate remains have as yet been recorded. The deposit referred to is the “Arctic Freshwater Bed,” discovered near Mundesley, by Mr. Alfred Nathorst (vide Journ. of Botany, vol. iii. 1873, p. 225), and investigated by my colleague, Mr. Clement Eeid, during the survey of the Norfolk coast (GEOL. MAG. for Dec. 1880).

Evidence is presented which shows that nepheline develops a preferred c-axis orientation in response to deformative stresses. It is believed that this is the first record of a stress-induced preferred orientation of nepheline.

The several bore-holes which have been put down through the A- Red Kocks in the south-east part of the county Durham to win the bed of Eock Salt there have directed attention to the age and classification of these rocks.

It is still fresh in our memory that the Geological Society of London made a bold attempt a few years ago to arranga a wide-ranging discussion on the problem of continental drift. On an occasion of this nature one might be tempted to imagine a scene as lively as that when the Wernerians and Huttonians met at the Castle Hill of Edinburgh. But the opponents of the hypothesis, as the report revealed, seem to have stood no less firm than do the continents, as they hold. One looks in vain, since the publication of the American Symposium, for a change in the trend of opinion. This, however, does not mean that the problem is closed. We thus welcome the fresh lead given by Dr. A. L. du Toit in his recent volume on Our Wandering Continents.

It is well known to all students of the history of geology that, although the date of publication of William Smith's “Map of the Strata of England and Wales” was the year 1815, yet even before the commencement of the present century the “Father of English Geology” had not only established the principle that strata can be identified by their organic remains, but had actually applied that important principle in the construction of a number of geological sections and maps. Conclusive documentary evidence of the truth of this statement is fortunately in the possession of the Geological Society.

The Upper Westphalian succession in the National Coal Board's Eastling Wood Borehole, 1976 ‘TR 6303 1472’ has been analysed in terms of upward-fining and upward-coarsening semicycles, transition probabilities and entropies. This analysis confirms that the succession can be divided into a lower coal facies, which like the earlier Westphalian deposits of Kent was laid down dominantly in deltas but which includes numerous channel-fills, and an upper channel facies laid down in a more upstream fluvial environment.

It not unfrequently happens in these days of superabundant scientific periodical literature that articles appear in which the authors, usually unwittingly, and generally from want of leisure, fail to give an adequate idea of the work of authors anterior to periods with which the writers are more specially acquainted. The injustice thus perpetrated can best be prevented by giving occasionally a brief resumé of work done in certain formations and in special areas during a given period.

At Broom, in the parish of Hawkchurch, near Axminster, close to the River Axe, in the angle formed by the junction of a tributary brook with it, is a low hill, the summit of which is about 50 feet above the level of the rails of the London and South-Western Railway, which runs at its base. This hill consists of a mass of chert gravel intermingled with ferruginous clay of a yellow colour, and interstratified with seams of sandy clay, without shells or other animal-remains, as far as is at present known. There are a few much-rolled pebbles of quartz; of a hard dark-grey siliceous rock; and of chalk flints, mingled with the chert fragments, many of which are angular or subangular. It has been cut into for ballast for the railway, and about half has been removed in the last fifteen years, exposing a section of from 40 to 50 feet in depth. The bottom of the pit is on a level with the rails, which are a few feet above the river, and about 150 feet above the level of the sea, about six miles distant. The chert gravel was probably derived from the Greensand which caps the hills inclosing the valley.

In the Lublin area of the East European Platform (southeast Poland) sedimentation of the Vendian–Cambrian marine sequence began in Late Vendian times. Vendian and Cambrian strata occur in sedimentary continuity and their features indicate sedimentation in the tidal zone of a shallow epicontinental sea. The Vendian–Cambrian boundary, drawn on the basis of mainly palaeontological data, passes between the Vendotaenia and Sabellidites zones.

On June 10th, 1898, whilst on an excursion with the Yorkshire Geological and Polytechnic Society, I found three specimens of fish remains in the Millstone Grits at Summit in Lancashire. Subsequently, on several occasions, I again visited the district and succeeded in collecting a large number of fish remains, and on these, together with a few other specimens which had been found in these rocks at rare intervals, I have based the following paper.

The question whether N. China was under the grip of Polar severity towards the close of the Tertiary or the beginning of the Pleistocene time, and whether there was sufficient precipitation to allow the existence of large glaciers even if the temperature had become for a time arctic, has, on account of its important bearing on the problem of the cause of glaciation, aroused from time to time forcible but conflicting arguments. As cumulative evidence tends to show the wide prevalence of desert conditions all over N. China throughout recent geological times, geologists seem to have generally agreed, and naturally so, to provide a negative answer to the second part of the question. But as to the first part, it remains so far completely shrouded in doubt. In matter of this kind nobody would expect to wrest out truth by mere theoretical contention. Any relevant fact, therefore, deserves to be placed on record.