Zoarium always unilaminate, nearly always adherent.

Zoœcia broad, length ·65–·8 mm., breadth ·45–·55 mm., aperture primarily semicircular but tending to quadrangular by thickening of the upper lip, and with a semicircular collar, the two ends of which are expanded into large perforated spine bases: the arched front wall springs from the inside of the side walls and is pierced along its edge by a row of large pores, and at a short distance inside this row by a row of smaller pores in fairly close correspondence with the outer row; the centre of the front wall is pierced by a very variable number of fine pores, which sometimes give clear indications of a third row corresponding to the two outer ones; the zoœcia always have common side walls of considerable width; in immature stages (Fig. 1) the front walls rise high above the side walls, and small beak-shaped avicularia are scattered irregularly between them; in a further stage of development (Fig. 2) the side walls are greatly thickened and raised above the front walls, absorbing the avicularia, and the perforated spine bases at the corners of the aperture grow inwards until they meet, and are fused into a stout bar across the aperture, so qualifying the species for admission to the Steginoporidæ; in the stage of maximum development (Fig. 3) the bar develops a stout denticle in the middle of the lower edge.

The difficulties, which the palæontologist encounters in attempting the interpretation of fossil organic remains are numerous, especially when compared with the task of the zoologist in the study of recent forms. In a fossil, for instance, the soft parts of the animal are wanting, while the endo- or exoskeleton is often remarkably dissimilar from that of its nearest living allies. Furthermore, the object he has to deal with has undergone mineralization, more or less completely, so that its appearance is greatly altered. But most frequently the object placed before him is only a fragment of the hard part of some animal which he is nevertheless called upon to identify at once.

The Christianburg and Akyma deposits afford excellent examples of the highly aluminous or bauxitic type of laterite formation. They here occur as parts of a residuary deposit derived from the decomposition in situ of an igneous rock, probably a porphyrite or a tuff, an almost pure quartz-sand, and masses of bauxite containing in the more aluminous varieties from 92·6 to 94·4 per cent. of the hydrates of alumina and in the ferruginous ones 64·6 per cent. of the hydrates of alumina with about 24 per cent. of the oxides and hydrates of iron.

J. de C. Sowerby (1836, p. 335) founded two new species of, Pollicipes from the Gault of Folkestone. To the one, based on a carina and tergum, he gave the name P. lœvis (p. 335, pl. xi, fig. 5); to the other, based on a rostrum and one of the latera of the lower whorl, the name P. unguis (p. 335, pl. xi, fig. 5*). He also referred a carina and tergum from the Upper Greensand of Blackdown to P. lœvis (p. 340, pl. xvi, fig. 1), but published no description of them.

British geologists must have read Professor Coleman's Address to the Geological Section of the British Association with great pleasure and interest. As Professor Coleman remarks, geology finds some of its most seductive problems in the neglected extremes of the earth's history. Out of the apparent tangle of the ‘drifts’ and Archæan Gneisses Canadian geologists are now evolving an orderly sequence which must exercise considerable influence upon the progress of geology in other lands. The seemingly unnatural conjunction of Pleistocene and Archæan, Professor Coleman states, has furnished the clue to certain puzzling problems of the Archæan.

J. Sowerby's type - specimens of Ammonites cordatus and Ammonites excavatus have been dealt with comparatively recently by Miss M. Healey in the Palœontologia universalis (sér. II, fasc. 1, August, 1905, Nos. 94, 94a, and 92, 92a, 92b respectively), but her statements require a little modification in some details. Both specimens are in the British Museum collection, and were described and figured in the Mineral Conchology.

In his monograph of Palæozoic Arachnida published in 1904, Dr. Fritsch divides the order Araneæ into two suborders—the Arthrarachnæ, Haase, containing the Arthrolycosidæ, and the Pleuraraneæ, Fritsch, containing the Hemiphrynidæ (Hemiphrynus) and the Promygalidæ (Promygale).

At the recent meeting of the International Geological Congress in Stockholm, Professor C. de la Torre, of the University of Havana, made the announcement of a discovery of fossil mammals of Pleistocene age, in cavern deposits of Central Cuba. Hitherto the known fossil Vertebrates were few. Mr. T. W. Vaughan, in America, had published a long paper discrediting those previously reported, but before that time the late Professor E. D. Cope (America's great Vertebrate Palæontologist) had passed over the doubtful forms, and accepted especially one species of Edentate, supposing that other forms were buried and submerged during the subsequent depressions of the land.