Two years ago at the Bath Meeting of the British Association, I had the honour to present a paper in which I compared the principal known Dinosaurs of Europe with those of America. In this communication I referred to some peculiar reptilian remains from the Gosau formation of Austria, and compared them with certain Laramie fossils from America, about which I hoped soon to have more definite information. As an indication of the rapidity with which knowledge of ancient life is advancing, it may be interesting to know what has been learned in two years concerning this single group of the remarkable reptiles known as Dinosauria. This group I have termed the Ceratopsidæ, and I shall refer especially to the forms I have recently investigated, and hope to describe more fully later on, under the auspices of the United States Geological Survey.

Very little is known in England of the Tertiary deposits of South Africa. Some marine beds are found, as at Bathurst, where the limestone is full of teeth of Carchadon and Lamna, and shells of Turritella Ostrea, Donax, and Lucina. The shells are preserved in the Albany Museum. I was informed that these beds are 300 to 400 feet above the sea. The teeth shown to me in their worn, polished, yellowish tone rather recalled the condition of Red Crag fossils.

In 1835 M. Charles Léveillé described a peculiar and extinct univalve shell under the name Porcellia, which he had discovered in the Carboniferous Limestone of Tournay in Belgium. Since that time the right of this name to stand has never been questioned, notwithstanding the fact of its pre-occupation by Latreille in 1804, for an Isopodous Crustacean genus, and which he rendered Porcellio. As the retaining of two names so nearly alike, differing only in their terminal letter, must constantly lead to confusion in Natural History nomenclature, it becomes necessary to suggest an alteration, and Léveillia is therefore proposed to take the place of Levéillé's genus Porcellia.

I do not think geologists who have studied the Himalayas will be disposed to agree with Mr. Howorth (ante, pp. 97–104, 156–163) that those mountains have come into existence since the time when the Mammoth flourished in Siberia. It is quite possible that the Himalayas are higher now than they were in Pliocene or even in Pleistocene times; but the geological evidence, so far as it is known, is, I think, in favour of the view expressed by Mr. R. D.

The following is the fundamental principle of the theory of terrestrial evolution which has been sometimes called the “expansion theory”:—

Masses of sediment laid down in an area of subsidence are gradually lowered to regions of the earth's crust that are at a higher temperature than that in which they were deposited. The sediment, being heated, expands, is crumpled and folded internally, and, bulging up at the surface, is reduced by denudation to the form of a mountain-chain.

During a recent examination of a collection of fossils made by Mr. George Wild in the Burnley Coal-field, Mr. John Ward, F.G.S., recognized a novelty in the small Microsaurian which forms the subject of the following notes. The specimen was forwarded to the British Museum for determination, and a detailed study of its characters proves it to represent a Microsaurian family that has not previously occurred in the Carboniferous of Europe.

A conglomerate in the Keuper. —Whilst a drain was being cut in Argyle Street, joining Upper and Lower Eastvilles, one of the upper beds exposed consisted of a rather fine conglomerate, made up largely of rolled quartz pebbles of small size, compacted with rounded quartz sand and intermixed with coloured fragments (generally very small flakes) of softer shale or clays. I did not measure the thickness very carefully, but I should think that it did not exceed six inches, and as the drain is now filled up, the means of more accurate measurement are lost. The distance from the nearest denuded edge of the Coal-measures is as nearly as possible half a mile.