In a paper read before the Geological Society in 1844, Sir Philip Egerton made known an interesting fossil Selachian from the Cretaceous beds of Mount Lebanon, which he named Cyclobatis oligodactylus, and referred to the Torpedinidæ, in consequence of its apparently unarmed skin and the resemblance between its general form and that of the familiar electric Torpedo. Six years afterwards Pictet figured and described a second specimen of the fish, adding some further particulars of the skeleton, and adopting Egerton's determination of its affinities. And quite lately, Mr. James W. Davis has made another contribution to our knowledge of the genus, by describing a larger and more robust species under the name of C. major. The fish is again relegated to the Torpedinidæ, and, so far as I have been able to discover, the same original determination has been universally adopted up to the present time.

The chief object of this paper is to describe an unmapped outlier of Bagshot Sand, inwhich the pebble-bed, frequently met with at this level, exhibits an extraordinary thickness and compactness. It is situated at Bearwood, on the estate of John Walter, Esq., who has kindly given me every facility for investigating it. The extent of the outlier may be said to coincide approximately with the space enclosed within the 250 foot contour-line of the Six-Inch Ordnance Survey Map.

Very little information has hitherto been published in regard to the fossil fishes of the well-known Miocene formation of the Maltese Islands. Dr. Leith Adams enumerates seventeen species in his latest contribution to the subject, but these are almost exclusively founded upon detached teeth. It is, therefore, of considerable interest to be able to place on record the discovery of a new and tolerably complete fish, obtained from an excavation made some months ago for new docks in the harbour of Valetta.

During last summer it was my good fortune to visit the three largest snowfields in Norway, namely, Folgefond, at the head of Hardangerfjord, in Southern Norway, whose area is 108 square miles; the Jostedalsfond, two degrees to the northward, and beyond Sognefjord, whose area is 580 square miles, and the largest snowfield in Europe; and the Svartisen, of nearly equal area, extending from just inside the Arctic Circle for 44 miles to the northward. All of these snowfields send down glaciers to within from 50 to 1200 feet of the sea.

Observations extending over several years upon glacial phenomena on both sides of the Atlantic had convinced the author of the essential identity of these phenomena; and the object of this paper was to show that the glacial deposits of Great Britain and Ireland, like those of America, may be interpreted most satisfactorily by considering them with reference to a series of great terminal moraines which both define confluent lobes of ice and also often mark the line separating the glaciated from the non-glaciated areas.

The appearance of Professor Bonney's letter in the December a Number of the Geological Magazine, inwhich he suggests that Mr. J. J. Harris Teall's proposed explanation of the cause of the foliation of the Lizard gabbro “ought to be regarded as an hypothesis on its probation, and should not be quoted as an undoubted fact,” emboldens me to offer some remarks on the subject.

For some years past the Upper Tertiaries of England have not received such a liberal share of attention as was bestowed on them at one time by the older geologists, probably in part because of the impression unwittingly encouraged by some of the authorities in science, that little original work in the way of discovery can now be done in connection with the organic contents of the Upper Tertiary deposits, the number of species already recorded being very large.

Mr. C. S. Wilkingson, Government Geologist for New South Wales, had the kindness to entrust his collection of Australian Tertiary plant-remains to me, for which I now express my most sincere thanks to him. I laid the results of my investigations before the Imperial Academy of Sciences of Vienna, in a Memoir, entitled: “Contributions to the Tertiary Flora of Australia, Part II.,” which follows a Memoir already published under the same title, Part I., in the forty-seventh volume of the “Denkschriften” of the same Academy.

Having been lately at St. Davids, I made some observations in relation to the Porth-lisky granite or Dimetian of Dr. Hicks, which may be worth recording in the pages of the Geological Magazine.

Perhaps it may be well for me to state that previous to my examination I had no bias whatever in favour of any of the explanations of the geology of St. Davids which have been offered by Hicks, Geikie, or Blake.

Owing to the impossibility of making an accurate Survey of many of the flatter and Drift-covered portions of England, in the absence of sections, the light boring tools so extensively used by the Geological Survey of Belgium have been experimentally tried during the last few months in the Isle of Wight. The results arrived at are of so much interest that the Director has requested me to draw up this preliminary notice.

The Hempstead Beds, which were thought to be confined to the outlier at Hempstead Cliff and another of unknown extent in Parkhurst Forest, prove to be much more important, indeed they occupy about half the Tertiary area of the Isle of Wight.

In the last Number of the Geological Magazine there is published a paper by Mr. Robert F. Tomes dealing with two Corals from the Silurian rocks of Britain. For the reception of one of these Corals Mr. Tomes proposes to form a new genus under the name of Hemiphyllum.

When I noticed this species in the January Number of the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE (pp. 1–10, Plate I.), I had not prepared a figure of the original specimen from the Hope Collection at Oxford, which had been kindly lent me by Prof. J. O. Westwood for that purpose.