Valves subcircular, approaching subquadrate, like some small Lamellibranchs. Umbo at the antero-dorsal corner, and at aa angle of 40° to the extreme curvature of the concentric ridgelets. Hinge-line straight, behind the umbo, about half the length of the longest diameter of the valve. The other edges rounded; the anterior nearly semicircular; the ventral obliquely curving up to meet the steeper and narrower posterior curve.

Everything relating to the progress of geology in our Colonies is, or ought to be, of interest to geologists at home; and those who have helped forward this movement are also deserving of recognition and commendation here. The subject of the present notice has left his hammer-marks on the rocks of Western Australia, and has covered many thousand miles on horseback, on foot, by rail and steamboat, from north to south and from east to west of this great region, containing an estimated area of 976,000 square miles, being about nine times that of the United Kingdom, and covering about one-third of the whole Australian Continent.

When in Rio de Janeiro last October, Dr. Orville A. Derby gave me for publication in the GEOLOGICAL MAGAZINE the photograph of a fine new specimen of Stereosternum tumidum, reproduced in the accompanying Plate V. Like the type-specimens discovered by Dr. Derby, it was obtained from a light-grey limestone in a quarry on the estate of Senhor Antonio Machado de Campos, near the town of Limeira, in the State of San Paulo, Brazil. It is interesting as showing for the first time the general proportions of the trunk and tail of this strange extinct reptile; and it also permits the identification of another fossil from the same formation, now in the British Museum, which has hitherto escaped notice.

This portion of the new trunk line to London covers a distance of about fifty miles, and runs nearly due south, crossing the towns of Nottingham, Loughborough, Leicester, Lutterworth, and Rugby. Throughout the greater part of this distance the railwayis on the Trias, except the northern portion, which is On thePermian, and the southern, which is on the Lias. There are also great thicknesses of Drift met with near Leicester and between that town and Rugby, but very little in the northern part on either side of Nottingham.

The Rev. Peter Bellinger Brodie was born in London in 1815. His father, Mr. P. B. Brodie, was an eminent conveyancer and barrister-at-law, while his uncle, Sir Benjamin C. Brodie, Bart, the celebrated surgeon, was President of the Royal Society from 1858 to 1861.

The genus Acanthoteuthis was founded by E. Wagner1 and G. Münster upon small booklets, sometimes isolated, sometimes associated with more or less complete remains of the animal, which are found in the Lithographic Stone of Bavaria. Münster characterized three species chiefly upon the form of these hooklets, viz, A. speciosa, A. Férussacii, and A. Lichtensteinii, and noticed the existence of a fourth. Subsequently Munster referred to this genus also a number of forms based principally upon the shape of the body and upon the form of the internal shell, but most of these were afterwards separated by A. Wagner as a new genus (Plesioleuthis). The genus Acanthoteuthis is therefore restricted to such forms as Münster described chiefly upon the form of the books.

The area herein described is that part of New York State lying south of Lake Ontario, and west of longitude 76°. The dimensions of the area are, approximately, 95 miles north and south and 155 miles east and west, or nearly 15,000 square miles. The rocks are shales, sandstones, and limestones of the Upper Silurian and Devonian systems. The strike is nearly east and west, with a southward dip averaging perhaps 50 feet to the mile.

Dr. George Mercer Dawson, F.R.S., whose portrait we present to our readers this month, is the son of Sir William Dawson, F.R.S., for many years Principal of McGill College, Montreal. Dr. Dawson was born at Pictou, Nova Scotia, August 2, 1849, and his early years were passed in Canada. After continuing his education in Scotland, he obtained his special training for a scientific career in the Royal School of Mines, Jermyn Street, of which he is an “Associate,” and where he was also awarded the “Murchison” and “Edward Forbes” Medals. His first scientific appointment was as Geologist and Botanist to the British North American Boundary Commission, which in the seasons of 1873–4 marked out the International Boundary between the United States and the Dominion of Canada, for a distance of 800 miles in length, from the Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains.

The genus Protoceras, described by the writer in 1891, from the Miocene of South Dakota, is now known to include some of the most interesting extinct mammals yet discovered. It likewise represents a distinct family, and thus deserves careful investigation and description. Before this discovery, no horned artiodactyles were known to have lived during Miocene time, and Protoceras is thus the earliest one described.

The cuttings along this new line of railway from Annesley to a little south of Rugby have been described by Mr. Fox-Strangways, and it is now proposed to note the chief geological features along the line as far as Quainton Road, near Aylesbury. This portion of the railway crosses the country from north to south, and south-east for a distance of about 35 miles. The following notes were made partly in November, 1895, when the cuttings were examined from Willoughby, near Rugby, to Helmdon; and partly in May of the following year, when the examination was continued to Quainton Road.

The specimen herein described was sent me by Mr. T. S. Hall, M.A., of Melbourne University. It was found by Mr. F. P. Spry in a rock of supposed Silurian age, at the Yarra Improvement Works, near Prince's Bridge, Melbourne, in November, 1896. The matrix is a fine-grained micaceous sandstone, of a dark purplegrey, weathering yellowish. It often contains crinoid columnals, such as were long ago noticed by the Geological Survey of Victoria, and were figured by W. Blandowski as “Cyatocrinites (probably)pinnatus”; but neither from here, nor from any other Silurian rock of Australia, has a crinoid crown hitherto been recoi-ded. The remains of the crinoid are in the form of an impression, coloured red by iron-oxide; all calcareous matter has been dissolved away. The counterpart of the impression has not been preserved. The specimen was studied by means of wax squeezes; the drawing (Plate XV) represents such a squeeze; and the description follows the drawing.

The growth of our knowledge of the gigantic extinct birds of Madagascar has been a very slow one. The first notice of their occurrence was published in 1851 by I. Geoffrey St. Hilaire; but it is only within the last two or three years that any part of their skeleton, except the bones of the leg and some very imperfect vertebrae, has been described. Eecently, however, the collections that have reached the Museum of Natural History at Paris, and those obtained by Dr. Forsyth Major for the British Museum, have filled most of the gaps, and all the important parts of the skeleton are now known.

Until a few years ago it was believed that the Territory of Patagonia was of an extremely simple and uniform geological structure; it was supposed that from the Colorado to the Straits of Magellan, and from the Atlantic to the base of the foot-hills of the Andes, it was constituted exclusively by the marine Patagonian Formation, on the age of which the most varied opinions were expressed, although all agreed in referring it to the Tertiary series. This uniformity was interrupted only at intervals by great sheets of basalt which appeared sometimes at the surface, sometimes below the boulder-deposit.

The extent of the glaciation in the Western-Midland Counties of England during the formation of the Chalky Boulder-clay has yet to be determined in detail. No accurate survey has at present been made of the various Drifts that are scattered over the country from Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire on the east to Worcestershire and Gloucestershire on the west; but the observations of Strickland, Brodie, Lloyd, Lucy, and others, have made known the characters of the superficial deposits at numerous localities in and around the vale of Evesham, while the probable limit of the action of land-ice during the period of maximum glaciation has been delineated on a small map by S. V. Wood, jun.

A collection of about twenty specimens of three or four kinds of shales, bearing several Estherian and small Molluscan fossils, was made by Mr. Joseph Mawson, F.G.S., Superintendent of the Bahia and San Francisco Railroad, several years ago, and presented by him to the British Museum. These are marked with the distances, in kilometres, from Bahia on the railway; and are provisionally referred by Mr. Mawson, some to the “Cretaceous” and some to the “Wealden” series.

In the first part of this paper I confined myself to the consideration of the age of the Himalayan granite; in this I propose to discuss Mr. Middlemiss's views regarding the cause of its foliation.

In the last number of the Geological Magazine Dr. J. W. Gregory has undertaken to give an opinion on the whole of the fossils described by me from the Morte Slates in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of May, 1896. He says he has been tempted to do this because someone had “recently read to the Geological Society of Cornwall” a paper in which he “assumes the Silurian age of the Morte Slates to be so well established that it may be accepted as the basis for future work.” Clearly this was too much for Dr. Gregory, and his righteous indignation compelled him at once to endeavour to put a stop to any such assumption. I do not, however, think that I shall have much difficulty in showing that Dr. Gregory's facts and conclusions are unreliable, and show a want of care and discrimination.

It is well known to all students of the history of geology that, although the date of publication of William Smith's “Map of the Strata of England and Wales” was the year 1815, yet even before the commencement of the present century the “Father of English Geology” had not only established the principle that strata can be identified by their organic remains, but had actually applied that important principle in the construction of a number of geological sections and maps. Conclusive documentary evidence of the truth of this statement is fortunately in the possession of the Geological Society.

Since the original description of Ceraterpeton by Huxley thirty years ago, several specimens have been referred to this interesting Stegocephalan genus, one even to the typical species, C. Galvani. No new examples from the typical locality, however, have hitherto been described, and our knowledge of the Irish form has thus remained without extension. Now, a nearly complete new skeleton has been discovered at Castlecomer, by J. G. Robertson, Esq., of Dublin, and I am indebted to him and to Professor Grenville Cole for the opportunity of studying it, and adding somewhat to the known characters of the animal.

The shell to which I have given the above name is at present unique. It was found, a few years ago, in a quarry at Clane, in the county of Kildare, where I had for some time been in search of Cephalopod shells. It was associated with characteristic species of Carboniferous Limestone fossils, among which the following Nautiloid shells may be mentioned, viz. Solenocheilus dorsalis, Phil., sp., Asymptoceras cyclostomus, Phil., sp., A. Foordi, Hyatt, and an undescribed species allied to the last-named one. The marginal spines, at first obscurely seen in the matrix, at once attracted attention; and although one was broken off and lost in the quarry débris, the other was fortunately found in the fragment of rock struck off from the shell, and was then carefully developed and attached to the latter. Naturally very diligent search has been made since its discovery, and a sharp look-out kept for any further specimens of this interesting species, but so far without any result.