Dr. preller's recent contributions to this Magazine on the geology of the Piedmontese Alps prove that (1) Italian authorities have expressed widely different opinions on this subject, and (2) some of them have maintained sundry Alpine gneisses and crystalline schists to be Palæozoic or Mesozoic (often Permian or Trias) in age. I infer from these contributions that he is well acquainted with the physical geography of this region, but fail to find in them any signs of either microscopic study or independent petrological work. As these have led me in several cases to very different results, I shall venture to put them on record as briefly as possible. In the course of thirty-five visits I have wandered over the peaks and valleys of the Alps from the southern border of the Cottians to the Salzkammergut, paying at first much more attention to physical than petrological questions. But in 1869, when beginning to lecture on geology, I found not only (as I was already aware) that my knowledge of rocks was scanty, but also that on this subject very little trust could be given to much that had been written. So I tried, as best I could, to teach myself. With this intention I visited many places of petrological interest in our own country and on the Continent, forming (partly by purchase) a considerable collection of rock specimens and slices. Circumstances soon directed my attention to the gneisses and crystalline schists, and from 1872 I paid more and more attention to them in my Alpine journeys, of which this was the thirteenth. In 1885 (my twenty-first journey) I began endeavouring to obtain clearer ideas about their succession, history, and relation to the ordinary stratified rocks, by running sections, sometimes up to, sometimes across the watershed of the chain, going in that year from the Lake of Lucerne to the Lago Maggiore and returning across the Great St. Bernard.