Two years ago, Mr. Robert H. Scott, F.R.S., Secretary to the I Council of the Meteorological Office, kindly sent me a letter from the Rev. J. G. Nicolay of Fremantle, Western Australia, accompanied by a photograph of a fossil, the original of which had been found by Mr. Davis ‘in the valley of the Arthur River, an affluent of the Gascoyne.’

I readily identified the fossil photographed as the impression of a fish-spine, similar in form, but more highly curved than those discovered in the Coal-measures of Arkansas, Indiana and Illinois, originally described by Prof. Leidy as a fish-jaw, and named by him Edestus vorax in 1855, and later as a fish-spine by MM. Newberry and Worthen (Geological Survey of Illinois, 1870, vol. iv. pp. 350–353, pi. i.).

The meeting of the British Association in Montreal gave different Irish geologists facilities for examining the Archæan rocks of Canada and the States, while since then they and also American geologists have had opportunities for studying the Irish Metamorphic rocks; it may therefore be allowable to give an epitome of our knowledge in regard to the latter.

We wish briefly to state an important result, which the study of certain Tertiary and Cretaceous beds in the neighbourhood of Mons has enabled us to arrive at.

For a long time past, the beds, well known in the district just mentioned, by the name of Tuffeau de Ciply, have been considered by all geologists to be the equivalents of the Maestrichtien, that is to say, as belonging to the highest subdivision of the Cretaceous series of Belgium.

During the summer of 1885, in excavating for a small reservoir for colliery purposes at Moira, three miles west of Ashby-de-la Zouch, au interesting deposit of a kind of Limonite Iron-ore was met with, the following description of which may interest some of the readers of the Geological Magazine.

The bed occurred about five feet below the surface soil, near a small stream, at a place called “Hanging Hill” [see Geol. 1-inch Map, Quarter-Sheet No. 63, N.W.]. In thickness it hardly reached a foot, but its extent was not proved; it rested unconformably upon stiff blue clay of the Coal-measures, and was overlaid by yellowish clay, loam, sand, etc., unstratified, containing a few pebbles and other drifted matter; it was principally composed of nodules and fragments of nodules of earthy yellowish brown ironstone, of similarly formed pieces of very hard and compact light grey siliceous stone having a thin crust or shell of compact dark brown iron-ore, (probably göthite), of sandy nodular masses largely composed of limonite; of fragments and small nodules of fossiliierous hard red hæmatite generally coated with a bright red skin which is often powdery; also specimens of compact brown iron ore having a yellow ochre coating, sometimes the compact red and yellow hæmatites are associated in the same sample, the latter variety appears to form a kind of shell to the red ore, though occasionally the two kinds exist in thin alternating bands.

Hydrosoma bilaterally developed. Branches regular, always furnished only with a single series of hydrothecæ (Monoprionidian). Hydrothecæ rectangular, touching one another, their inferior margin slightly curved. Sicula generally persistent; its free, pointed, downwardly directed end at the proximal extremity of the hydrosoma.

In 1851 M Coy (Brit. Pal. Foss. p. 9) proposed the generic name Didymograptus for two-branched species with one row of cells “sometimes on the inner, sometimes on the outer side of the branches.” Nearly at the same time Geinitz established his genus Cladograptus to include all two-armed or furcate Graptolites.

The Committee has during the past year received several Returns relating to the south and east coasts of England. Most of those relating to the coast south of the Thames are printed.