Since the Fenland Research Committee was formed in 1932, several papers have appeared, under its auspices, describing recent research work in the Fen District. The present article is a contribution to the work of this Committee, but describes deposits which are earlier in date than those which have been dealt with so far. The marine gravels have long been known near the town of March in Cambridgeshire, and the object here is to collect what is known up to the present (1934) about this deposit and to discuss its relation to the glacial and implementiferous deposits of southern Fenland and in the neighbourhood of Cambridge. The term “March Gravel” will be used here in reference to the sands and gravels which contain marine organisms and which are found on the “islands” between Peterborough on the west and the “Bedford River”, near Manea, on the east.

The classificatory position of the genus Cyclocystoides remains shrouded in doubt. This is due in some measure to the paucity of the material available for study and the unsatisfactory state of preservation of many specimens. The greatest difficulty is, however, due to the fact that it presents many features which are unique, and which make its correlation with known groups far from a simple matter.

Diagnosis.—Shell small, thin, tapering more rapidly towards apex. Marginal grooves well developed, with raised rims between which there is a fine longitudinal furrow. Faces, flat to slightly concave, ornamented with strong transverse ridges, evenly distributed, narrower and less rounded than the interspaces, forming rounded angles of about 135° and also bending forward at lateral ends.

In work on fossil brachiopods the present writer has found that descriptions and more particularly figures of the musculature of living froms are insufficiently explicit for parallels to be drawn with fossil specimens. These notes are the result of dissections of specimens of the living Terebratulinid Gryphus vitreus (Born) from the Marine Biological Station at Naples, and are intended primarily to elucidate the accompanying figures, which it is hoped might be of some value to palaeontologists.

Some thirty years ago two species of Ophiuroidea and one Astereroid species were collected by one of us (Theodore Groom) from a small quarry near Rorrington in the Shelve District of Shropshire. There originally were several specimens but unfortunately the majority of these are now represented by plasticine casts only. The original material, was mislaid during a loan and was recovered in part only last year. The finder’s provisional description and figures, as well as his notes on the precise horizon and locality are still missing. It may be added that when, soon after the discovery of the specimens, their importance was realized an attempt was made to gain more material, the site was found to be built over. The specimens which are still to hand have been examined by Dr. Stubblefield, who says that there is no doubt that the matrix is that of the Spy Grit, a low Caradoc horizon, probably in the zone of Mesograptus multidens. It is from approximately this horizon that the majority of the British Ordovician starfish have been collected.

Through the kindness of a correspondent in Southern California, the writer recently acquired a series of 320 superb examples of Dentalium neohexagonum S. and P. collected from the Fernando formation of that state. The following somewhat detailed account of the variations occurring in the collection may prove of interest to students of the Scaphopoda. Our study of this series is supplemented by the addition of other material of the species, collected by Charles Sternberg, from the Pleistocene in the vicinity of San Quintin, Baja California, Mexico, and a few examples of the species, now found living off the California coast, dredged by Henry Hemphill.

In “Faunas Triassicas do Brasil”, by F. R. Cowper Reed (Monogr. Serv. Geol. Brasil, ix, 1929), there occurs on pp. 84, 85, a note by me on an obscure crinoid. This should have been accompanied by an illustration, but the drawing supplied was not reproduced. It has recently been returned to me by Dr. Cowper Reed, who concurs in my suggestion that it should now be published since the occurrence is certainly interesting and is liable to be overlooked among the wealth of lamellibranchs described by him, and beautifully figured on his plates by E. T. Talbot.