The remarkable specimen dealt with in this paper was discovered by Mr. R. May, of Downing College, Cambridge, in the earlier part of the year 1922, and was forwarded to me by Mr. Henry Woods, F.R.S., for study and description. Mr. Woods informs me that “the specimen was found in the Boulder Clay of Hertfordshire, and consists of a portion of a body-chamber of a Perisphinctoid Ammonite in the matrix of which there are wings of a dragon-fly. The ammonite is, of course, derived. It has been examined by Dr. L. F. Spath, Dr. F. L. Kitchin, and Mr. J. Pringle, each of whom has stated that he believes it has come from the Ampthill Clay (of Corallian age)”.

The view from the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking either westward to the sea or eastward over the plains beside the Salween, is of exceptional geological attractiveness. At the foot of the hill the Salween River passes through a breach in the Coast Range to the Gulf of Martaban. To the east picturesque monoliths, tors, and sierras rise abruptly from a vast alluvial plain which lies between the Coast Range and the distant Dawna Mountains on the Burmese side of the Siamese frontier. The interest of the view in September, 1921, was enhanced by uncertainty as to the age of the rocks. The foundation of the Coast Range consists of a blue gneiss, which is worked in large quarries to provide road metal for Rangoon. The Dawna Range, on the eastern side of the basin, is also of coarse gneiss and schist. These Eozoic rocks of both the Coast and Dawna Ranges belong to the Martaban Group of Theobald, who described them as “true crystalline rocks undistinguishable in character from the ordinary gneissose rocks of Bengal”. The sedimentary rocks overlying the Martaban Group belong to the Moulmein Group of T. Oldham, and have been regarded as Carboniferous on the strength of his preliminary determination in 1856 of some fossils from a limestone hill known as the “Duke of York's Nose”, near Moulmein.

The small collection of fossil plants from Burma here described was made in 1921 by Professor J. W. Gregory, in the neighbourhood of Tichara and the Mepale River, near the Siamese frontier, east of Moulmein. Tichara is a few miles north-west of Myawadi, on the frontier of Siam, and 14 miles to the north-east of Kawkareik. It is a little north of the Mepale River, which flows south-eastward into the Thaungyin, on which Myawadi stands.

Many workers in the domain of the petrology of sedimentary rocks will welcome the article by Dr. Rastall in the Geological Magazine for January, 1923, and will appreciate the fact that certain notes therein help to make clear what may or may not reasonably be expected from this branch of geology. Judging from what has been said and written from time to time, I fear there is some amount of misconception as to what is being and has been achieved by the study of the rarer minerals and grain-size of sediments. As Dr. Rastall has paid me the compliment of referring to certain work with which I was concerned, in part during the war, it may be of interest and service if I indicate briefly the character of some of the work done and the utility of the petrographic methods adopted.

In the Geological Survey Memoir, “The Geology of the Coasts adjoining Rhyl, Abergele, and Colwyn,” Mr. (now Sir Aubrey) Strahan most truly observes (p. 18): “There is in scarcely any part of this country a more remarkable development of chert than that which overlies the Carboniferous Limestone of North Flintshire.”