In March of the present year (1909) the Rev. R. Ashington Bullen, who was then travelling in Majorca, wrote to inform me of the existence of a supposed ossiferous breccia situated on the east coast of that island. This caused a long-deferred project of exploring the Balearic Islands in search of Pleistocene cave-deposits to be carried out, and a month was spent in this manner, although a much longer period would be required for an exhaustive examination of Majorca alone, which was the only one of the group visited. A considerable tract of limestone country was investigated, and the result was the discovery of three ossiferous cave-deposits, including the one mentioned above. Similar remains were procured from each of these, and on examination prove to be those of an ungulate which appears to be without parallel. No great quantity of material was obtained, but this fortunately includes a well-preserved skull of an old individual with the associated mandible and atlas vertebra—the typespecimen, see Fig. 1—as well as a number of perfect examples of various limb-bones.

Description.—Specimen consisting of the natural cast of a left valve: form oblong, subtrigonal, mostly compressed; umbo anterior, depressed, incurved, succeeded in front by prominent lunuloid cavity; dorsal margin posteriorly elongate, oblique, continuous with the terminal curvature of margin; anterior region short, deep, slightly inflated on the ventral side of umbonal area; outer margin deeply excavated beneath the umbo, afterwards of oval contour; ventral margin anteriorly inflated, deeply sinuated in rear; posterior region furnished with an obtuse ridge directed obliquely from the umbo to the postero-ventral angle, on each side of which the valve slopes and becomes compressed; lateral face of valve between the anterior inflation and posterior ridge triangularly depressed; sculpture lines obscure.

Zoarium, always encrusting.

Zoœcia pyriform, average length, and breadth ·43 mm. and ·28 mm.; aperture semicircular, with a small tubercle at each side; front wall normally formed of five pairs of spines, the space between the lowest pair being filled by a triangular plate perforated at the apex and possibly tubular, as when it is broken off its base proves to be perforated; when there is a preceding zoœcium with an oœcium the fifth pair of spines and the triangular plate disappear, and the space so left is filled by the preceding oœcium, which always carries a small avicularium, possibly a relic of the triangular plate; the spines are not always strictly paired; the backbone is often depressed and pierced by irregular pores.

In 1876 Owen described the tip of the snout of a large fossil reptile from South Africa under the name of Tapinocephalus atherstoni. Although a few vertebræ and other bones of the skeleton are known, as no further remains of the skull have been found we have been in complete ignorance of the affinities of this one of our largest Karroo reptiles.

Situated in the neighbourhood of Birch Tor, in the heart of the granite mass of Dartmoor, at an elevation of between 1300 and 1400 feet, there are a number of tin-mines which have been worked fitfully from remote peridods (Fig. 1). The region is wild and lonely, and has in a marked degree all the scenic peculiarities of the moorland districts of the west of England.

Schimper (Traité de Paléontologie végétale, t. iii, p. 680) established in 1874 his Étage paléocène pour les “Sables de Bracheux, Travertins anciens, Lignites et grés du Soissonnais”, which are coeval with the Thanet Sands and the Woolwich Series. As there is a natural break between these and the London Clay (=the French Sables de Cuise), and as the Eocene contained more varied faunas than the Oligocene, Miocene, and Pliocene Tertiaries, I accepted that division in my description of the Kopenhague fauna, which formed the Lower Palæocene, together with the Montien of Belgium, older marine beds which are unknown in England.

The appearance of Professor E. Weinschenk's paper at the close of last year on two specimens of Moldavite from Kuttenburg, in Bohemia, affords a convenient opportunity of recording occurrences of the related ‘obsidianites’ (referred to by Professor Weinschenk as Billitonite and Australite) in the Malay Peninsula.