This iron was found on January 5th, 1884, by Alfred Eaton, a mounted police constable, when on duty in the sub-district of Youndegin, at a spot distant about 60 chains (three-quarters of a mile) in a north-west direction from the top of Penkarring Rock, and roughly estimated by him as 70 miles east of York, Western Australia; this must be about longitude 117°30', E. of Greenwich, latitude 31°30' S. Only one of four observed fragments having been brought in by Mr. Eaton, the late Captain Smith, Commissioner of the Police at Perth, sent him out to Penkarring with a native assistant with instructions to bring in the other three, at the instance of the Rev. Charles G. Nicolay, Curator of the Geological Museum, Fremantle, to whomthe late Mr. Edward T. Hardman, F.C.S., the Government Geologist, had expressed his belief in the meteoric origin of the iron.

A Chemical analysis of this felspar, to which our attention was directed by Professor Bonney, and which was subsequently described on crystallographic and optical grounds as orthoclase, shows it to be a sodapotash felspar of somewhat peculiar composition.

In the following table, the first two columns give the results obtained on analysis (Fletcher) of two loose crystals, of which the second was a twincrystal of lighter eolour than the first; the next two columns represent the same analyses if the oxide of iron (present as visible enclosures) and the loss on ignition are neglected; the numbers in the fifth column are obtained by taking the means of the numbers in the two preceding columns.

More than a year ago I obtained a number of minerals in Boylestone quarry, which lies about a quarter of a mile north-west of Barrhead, near Glasgow.

Upon breaking up at home the very unwieldly druses which alone seem to occur at this locality, I found one which contained Greenockite.

A single bright yellow crystal only occurs, and it lies so deep in the specimen, between two mammillations of prehnite, that its form cannot be deciphered.

I was induced by the urgent solicitations of a local collector, to whom I mentioned the find, to refrain for a time from announcing it. His argument was that the mineral collectors of the neighbourhood should have the earliest chance of being supplied.

As I have myself fruitlessly visited the quarry since, and as even the occurrence of the ordinary zeolites is only very occasional therein, I conclude that time must elapse before more crystals are turned out.

This mineral occurs plentifully, though finely disseminated, in the veins of auriferous quartz in the Lydenburg district of the Transvaal. These veins are often capped by a "gossan" of brown hvematite, crystalline, amorphous, or at times pseudomorphous after iron pyrites; a good deal of similar brown hæmatite occurs also throughout the veins themselves. The Bismutite is disseminated irregularly through the veins, and also occurs in small pockets in the ferruginous gossan; it is from the latter source that the mineral was obtained for the subjoined description and analysis.

It is amorphous, pulverulent; colour greenish yellow to lemon-yellow, more rarely brownish yellow; opaque (feebly translucent, with waxy lustre under the microscope); its hardness appears to be about 8, but cannot well be determined on account of its pulverulent character. Specific gravity 6.86.

In the last Number of the Society's Journal I described some crystals of apatite (francolite variety) from St. Just district of Western Cornwall; I have now to bring to the notice of the members some very fine beautiful crystals of this same mineral which I have received from Mr. Henson.

In point of beauty and lustre they far surpass any of the apatites that have yet been found in England.

The crystals are in the form of hexagonal prisms, doubly terminated with basal planes and narrow pyramid planes; colour pale bluish green, translucent with strong vitreous lustre.

They vary in size from a pin's head to half-an-inch across.

The great similarity which exists in the crystallographie and optical constants, cleavage, and absence of twinning in the isomorphous rhombic sulphates is especially marked in Barytes and Celestine, but though the combination of forms is sometimes the same, yet up to the present time a marked individuality has bees perceived in Celestine crystals which has made it easy to recognise the one mineral from the other.

The crystals of Celestine from near Bristol in the red marl, those associated with sulphur from Sicily, or the large flat more or less bluish tabular crystals from Strontian Island, Lake Erie, are varieties which are seldom if ever mistaken for Barytes.

The not unfrequent occurrence of the variety of Calcite, containing Carbonate of Lead and known as "Plumbo-calcite," at the Leadhills district, suggested that an examination of some of the ordinary Calcites from this locality, for Lead, might be of interest. The specimens for this examination were most kindly put at my disposal by Dr. Wilson. All of them were ordinary Calcites, none consisting of the recognised Plumbo-calcite.

If the planes of a crystal be replaced by lines drawn perpendicular to them through a point the intersection of the sheaf of lines so formed with the plane of the paper is the Gnomonic Projection of the crystal; each face being represented by a point and each zone by a line joining two such points. This projection, which has been frequently used and fully described, has generally been employed to represent the symmetrical disposition of the faces, the plane of the figure being a plane of symmetry.

But the practical value of the projection is best seen when it is used either as a graphic representation of the forms of a mineral, or as a method of drawing a perspective figure of any part of a crystal.

In my description of a Glaucophane-eclogite from the val d' Aoste, I alluded to the occurrence of a rather similar rock in the Ile de Groix (off the south coast of Brittany) in the following words:—" In the Ile de Groix the glaueophane occurs in no great abundance, with greenish mica, epidote, garnet, hornblende, and but little quartz." My knowledge of the rock, as then stated, was from one or two specimens only; but in the autumn of 1886 I paid a short visit to the Ile de Groix in order to see the rock in the field. I then found that in the above phrase I had unwittingly done an injustice to this locality for glaucophane, for I obtained specimens in which that mineral is even more abundant and almost as well developed as in the rock from the Val d' Aoste. On this account, and as the locality is rarely visited, I venture to think that a few notes may be interesting to the Society, although the rock has been already excellently discussed by Dr. Charles Barrois, to whom I am much indebted for information about this and other interesting localities in Brittany.

In 1881-1882 Dr. A. Brotherus and his brother, A. H. Brotherus, made a botanical tour in Armenia and the Caucasus; the younger gentleman collected a few specimens of rocks met with during their journey, which, on his return, he kindly left to be examined by me.

This material consisted of later eruptive rocks; it was scanty, but as it was obtained in places from which we have no earlier information of a similar character, I have not thought it uncalled for to make in the following lines a slight contribution to our knowledge of the geognosy of the regions in question.

The microscopical analysis of rocks from the Caucasus made by Tsehermak, Lagorio, and Möhl relate in part to the identical rocks that I shall describe, but the localities are different.

The granite of the Cheesewring Quarry is coarse grained and grey in colour. It is essentially composed of white felspar, quartz and two micas. Tourmaline occurs sparingly. The dominant felspar is orthoclase, frequently twinned on the Carlsbad plan. Crystalline form is not well developed. Under the microscope the individual grains do not, as a rule, give detinite extinction. Different portions extinguish at slightly different angles. The arrangement of the different portions is often very irregular; sometimes, however, it gives rise to a striped structure, under crossed nieols, suggestive of micro-perthite ; but in no case has a perfectly definite intergrowth of plagioclase and orthoelase been observed. Examined by Szabo's method the orthoclase is seen to be fairly rich in soda. A well striated plagioclase occurs in the rock, but is present in very small quantity. When it does occur it is often seen to be idiomorphic with respect to quartz.

Some little confusion having apparently arisen with respect to the characters of certain Cornish apatites, it may be well in the interests of scientific exactitude to point out the following facts. —In a series of specimens of Franeolite from Fowey Consols one may observe every gradation of form betwixt long and coarsely striated hexagonal prisms and narrow-edged crystals of an almost lenticular shape. Similar to the latter in their small vertical measurement are the "thin hexagonal plates" which have been enumerated among the known varieties of Cornish apatite, and which are, indeed, indistinguishable in general characters from the recently described Francolite of Levant Mine, St. Just. The particular Francolite, however, which, obtained by Mr. Talling from Fowey Consols, was shown by Maskelyne and Flight to contain over 5 per cent. of calcium carbonate (Journ. Chem. Soc. Jan. 1871), must not be identified with any one of the three varieties just mentioned.