The Mines Department announces the formation of an Advisory Committee to assist the Secretary for Mines in matters relating to the Metalliferous Mining Industry. Never was the mining of metalliferous ores in this country in a more parlous condition, for, with the exception of iron ore and ironstone mining and quarrying, practically all the metal mines of the country are shut down, for the very good reason that the cost of production of the dressed minerals is higher than the price at which they can be sold. The high price of production is to be ascribed partly to the increased cost of labour, partly to the high price of materials; while the low price offered for the products is due partly to the low level at which the metals stand in the markets of the world (they are down in some cases nearly to pre-war level), and partly to the high returning charges of the smelters, whose costs have been heavily increased both by the high price of labour and the excessive cost of fuel. Mr. Bridgeman is to be congratulated on being able to get together such a representative body to advise the Mines Department.

The State of New York has long been famous as the centre from which radiated, out geological life and energy to the early explorers, whose followers are now to be found spread over the vast States of America. The names of Emmons, Silliman, Dana, and Hall, and a host of other great geologists, may be cited, whose records will never die, and whose work is now being carried on by their living representatives. Such a surviving successor of James Hall now worthily fills his chair at the Albany Museum.

The collections described by Mr. Spath were made during Sir Martin Conway's Expedition across Spitsbergen in 1896, and include also those then collected by Professor Garwood and presented by him to the British Museum of Natural History.

Of the rich collections of fossils made by Professors J. W. Gregory and E. J. Garwood, as members of Sir Martin Conway's expedition to Spitsbergen in 1896, only a few Labyrinthodont remains, so far, have been described; but through the kind offices of Dr. A. Smith Woodward, the writer some time ago was entrusted with the naming of the Cephalopoda in those collections. The Ammonites are of the greatest interest, both from a palæontological and a stratigraphical point of view; and in view of the impossibility of publishing, in the near future, a full description of the fauna, with the necessary number of plates, it is intended to give a short preliminary account of these Cephalopoda. It is matter for regret that other groups of invertebrate fossils, such as the Triassic Pelecypoda, or the Upper Jurassic Aucellids, could not be dealt with, and their detailed study, probably, would yield important results. Spitsbergen Vertebrata, on the other hand, always have received considerable attention.

1. Garnet gneisses of sedimentary origin are described from the oldest group of sediments recognized in Southern Eyre Peninsula, South Australia. The high-grade metamorphism which these rocks have undergone has resulted in the development of felspar, garnet (almandine), sillimanite, and green spinel. 2. The mineralogical association of these constituents is described, and their genetic relations are discussed. 3. A sedimentary origin of these gneisses is attested by their interbanding with undoubted sediments, their mineralogical composition, and lastly by chemical analysis. 4. In the garnet gneisses developed in the Grenville series of North America, notably those of the Adirondack region, and in the province of Quebec, these para-gneisses find their most striking analogues.

Drevermann has already described and figured this species, and there can be no doubt that the shell from Smugglers' Cove described by Etheridge as ‘O. hipparionix (sic) or striatula’ belongs to it. There are several much better examples in the Sedgwick Museum from Smugglers' Cove, which fully confirm this conclusion. The specimen from Looe, figured by Davidson (op. cit. supra) as O. hipparionyx ? is believed by Drevermann to belong to O. provulvaria, but he does not mention Etheridge's shell from Smugglers' Cove. There is also one imperfect example in the Sedgwick Museum from the New Cut. Williams and Breger consider Schnur's Orthis hipparionyx (non Vanuxem) from Prtim in the Eifel, to be identical with Hall's Schuchertella woolworthana from the Lower Helderberg of New York.

When Richthofen journeyed in the Wutai district, Shan-si, he found a mighty sequence of metamorphosed sedimentary strata which could not be classed as his Sinian or any series younger than the Sinian, nor could it be regarded as belonging to the Old Gneiss and Gneiss-granite group. They are apparently equivalent to similar strata occurring in eastern Shan-tung and Liao-tung. In descending the Wutai-shan along its southern flank, Richthofen first came across a thick series of green schists with alternating beds of grey slates and quartzites, and then several series of coarse quartzitic and felspathic well-stratified rocks, aggregating to a thickness of more than 5,900 feet. He calls the whole sequence of these strata the “Wutai Formation”, and parallels it with the Huronian. This term at once found a wide application in Chinese geology. Thus in the western Tsing-ling Range, south of Lioyang-hsien (about long. 106° E., lat. 33° 25′ N.), and in the high mountains west of Ta-tsien-lu (about long. 102° 10′ E., lat. 30° N.), Loczy distinguishes a series of highly metamorphosed sedimentary rocks, such as gneiss, schists, phyllites, crystalline limestone, etc., and assigns it to the Wutai Formation. The “Nan-shan Sandstone”a series of unfossiliferous grey and green sandstones with well-cleaved or even schistose clayslates, typically developed in the northern foothills of the Nan-shan Ranges—is also tentatively regarded by the same author as a Wutai Formation. Between Ping-liang and Men-chou, in the province of Kan-su, Futterer identified in several places the Nan-shan Sandstone, and found other metamorphosed sedimentary strata of the Wutai Formation, consisting of chlorite-schist, coarse-grained quartzite, slate, and graywacke. In all these cases the term Wutai evidently implies the analogy with the Algonkian of North America.