John Wesley Judd was born at Portsmouth February 18th, 1840. His father belonged to a branch of an old Kentish family that had been settled for several generations in the Isle of Wight. His mother was the daughter of a Scotchman who had “come South” from the ancient kingdom of Fife. The Christian name given to the subject of this sketch was the result of an attempt on the part of his parents to find a compromise between the two national religions in which they had been respectively brought up.

The huge masses of chalk in the glacial drift on both sides of Cromer, and especially at the headland near Trimingham, have for many years attracted the attention of geologists. In this Magazine (Dec. II, Vol. VII, 1880, p. 55) and in the Survey Memoir on the Geology of the Country around Cromer, published in 1882, Mr. Clement Reid ascribes those at the latter place to the advance of an ice-sheet by which the chalk has been thrust up into a kind of fold and the flint layers have been bent, illustrating his interpretation by a diagrammatic section. We visited the Cromer cliffs for the first time in 1892, and after a careful examination of the Trimingham headland, not only felt more strongly than before certain weak points in Mr. Reid's reasoning, but also observed some facts difficult to reconcile with his conclusions. Since that date we have more than once visited these sections, and found last April that comparatively recent inroads of the sea had made great changes which had shown the relations of the chalk and glacial drift to be, in our opinion, incompatible with Mr. Reid's interpretation.

The specimens on which the following notes are based were JL collected by Mr. H. T. Ferrar, M.A., F.G.S., while on a tour through New Zealand, during the time the “Discovery” was being overhauled in Lyttelton, on her return from the Antarctic. The topographical and field notes were also supplied by Mr. Ferrar, and it must be clearly understood that only the detailed petrographical descriptions are the work of the present writer.

The specimens were obtained near the middle of the North Island of New Zealand, and in the area marked “acidic volcanic rocks” in Sir James Hector's geological map of New Zealand, published in 1883. They all occur in the Taupo zone, the hot-lake district which lies roughly between Lake Taupo on the south and Lake Rotorua on the north.

In two previous papers I have set out the conclusions generally held by Northern geologists in regard to the more recent history of the Eastern Baltic, according to which it was once a great enclosed fresh-water lake or sea, the Ancylus lake, which by the breach in the land-bridge connecting Skäne and Denmark was converted into a brackish-water sea, the Litorina sea, which has in turn become less and less saline until it has reached its present condition.