I have been asked by Professor Gregory to examine and describe two pebbles which he has collected from the pre-glacial gravel of Little Hayes, in the Crouch Valley, South-East Essex. Examined in thin section under the microscope, one of these pebbles agrees very well with the typical chert of Arngrove (Bucks) and Studley (Oxon) in size of spicules, their mineralization, their number in a given field, and the proportion of angular sand-grains.

West of the marine Jurassic rocks near Mombasa the Uganda Railway traverses for 46 miles a belt of sandstones and shales which are grouped together as the Duruma Sandstone. The few fossils hitherto obtained from this series have not given any definite evidence as to its age, which is, however, shown by the relations of the sandstones to the Kambe Limestone to be pre-Bathonian. The Mazeras Sandstone, one of the upper members, contains many trunks of Dadoxylon, the age of which, according to Professor Seward, may be anything from Trias to Kainozoic. An Estheriella and some plants were found in the Maji ya Chumvi beds by Maufe and have been regarded as either Permian or Triassic. The lowest division, the Taru Grit, has not yet yielded any certain fossil, but it has been regarded as continuous with the shales in the Sabaki Valley, which yielded the Permian mollusc, Paleanodonta fischeri, and with the plant bearing Tanga beds in the north-eastern corner of Tanganyika Territory. A bore in quest of water was made near Samburu Station to the depth of 527 feet in the Taru Grits. The cores are preserved by the Uganda Railway at Nairobi, and Mr. David Harris recently re-examined them and made the useful discovery of two fragments of fossil plants. They have been kindly sent to me by Dr. A. W. Rogers and examined by Professor A. C. Seward. He identifies them as a Voltzia and an Ullmania. For the drawings, Fig. 1, I am indebted to Mr. L. D. Currie. Both fossils are specifically indeterminable, but Professor Seward states that they certainly belong to the flora collected by Dr. Teale in the Tanga beds, which was described in 1922. Professor Seward assigns that flora to an age between the Upper Permian and the Rhaetic, and seems inclined to regard it as probably Trias.

The Colonial Office Report on the work of the Mineral Survey of Southern Nigeria for 1905–6 gave a few details on the occurrence of bitumen in Ijebu and a paper by Mr. R. Bullen Newton published in the Ann. and Mag. of Nat. Hist., Section 8, VIII, pp. 193–208, described some mollusca which fortunately were preserved in one or two of the shallow boreholes put down to afford information on the beds then named the “Ijebu Series”. No details of the beds passed through were, however, published, and the following note is intended to supplement the Report mentioned.

The area examined occupies about 12 square miles in South Cardiganshire bounded inland by a line joining the hamlets of Sarnau and Nanternis, and extending along the coast from the stream crossing Penbryn Sands in the south to New Quay in the north.

Included in a large assemblage of corals from the Lower Carboniferous Shales—referred to a Z horizon—overlying the Lower Carboniferous Sandstone anticline (K) on the north coast of Co. Sligo is a remarkable new genus—Caenophyllum—which forms the subject of this paper. Caenophyllum gen. nov. claims distinction in showing a very unusual life-history—quite unlike that of any known coral; and forms a very interesting example of abnormal coral ontogeny. The shales form cliffs at Pollarone, near Dromore West, Co. Sligo, and vary in height from 30 to 50 feet. They are cut off by the rising tide, and consequently have hitherto been neglected; but are of great importance in zonal work, as they contain a rich coral and Bryozoan fauna and thus form a starting point for zonal investigation.