The typical species of this small section and the first to be described is P. cuneifolia. Within its compass are three other plants which in their time have been given specific diagnoses but are here regarded as coming more properly into the category of subspecies—P. saxifragifolia, P. hakusanensis, and P. heterodonta. P. cuneifolia, thus interpreted, has a distribution extending from N.E. Siberia to Japan, the Aleutian Islands, and the Alaskan coast. The section contains two other species—P. nipponica which is confined to Japan, and P. suffrutescens from the Sierra Nevada of California, thus widely separated geographically.

A series of extensive temporary exposures in glacial deposits, partially filling an abandoned valley of the River Dee immediately south of Torry Hill, Aberdeen, has thrown some light on the late glacial history of the Aberdeenshire coastal strip. These deposits consist of rather more than twenty feet of fine, well-stratified sediments, similar to sediments recorded in other parts of the city of Aberdeen, and at a number of points along the coast almost as far as Peterhead.

These sediments, which were first mentioned by T. F. Jamieson (1858), were not differentiated by him from the red boulder clay found also in this area. A. Bremner (1915), the only worker to publish important communications on the glaciology of the area since Jamieson, has explained the sediments as deposits formed in glacial lakes when an ice-sheet filling the North Sea dammed the natural drainage. Bremner (1931) believed that three separate ice sheets had succeeded one another in North-East Scotland. The ice sheet responsible for damming up the waters in which the sediments under discussion were formed was the second of these. It moved in a northerly direction in this area, bringing with it erratics from the Old Red Sandstone of Strathmore. The third ice sheet was local. Movement was eastwards from the high ground towards the sea. According to Bremner, this ice failed to reach the coast at some points, as, for instance, immediately south of the Bay of Nigg. However, in the area of Aberdeen city this ice is supposed to have given rise to the morainic topography which backs the beach.

It has been known from antiquity that involution of the uterus is aided by putting the child to the breast, and the work of Moir (1933) has demonstrated conclusively that suckling brings about waves of contraction of the puerperal uterus. Since suckling must necessarily involve stimulation of the nipple, it seemed of interest to know what sensory apparatus is present in the nipple to receive these stimuli. While histological studies of the mammary gland itself have been numerous, only slight attention has been paid to the histological structure of the areola and the nipple.

It must be appreciated from the outset that the present study is devoted to the innervation of the nipple in the quiescent breast. There may be considerable change during pregnancy and lactation, not only in the size of the organ and its epithelium but also in the other structures. It has been shown that there is an increase in the number of nerve-fibres in the actively secreting mammary tissue, and it is possible that there is an increase in the nerve-structures of the nipple also. The richness of the innervation in the quiescent nipple certainly makes a further study of these nerve-structures during pregnancy and lactation of great interest.

The Clyde Plateau Lavas which are part of the Lower Carboniferous succession in the west of Scotland form the main mass of the Campsie Hills in Stirlingshire and the Kilpatrick Hills in Dunbartonshire. Below the lavas at the western end of the Campsie Hills are cement-stones and sandstones of the Ballagan Series. These are the lowest beds of the Carboniferous in this area, and in places are seen to overlie without apparent unconformity the Upper Old Red Sandstone. Few fossils have been found in them; the only plants so far recorded are Asterocalamites scrobiculatus Schloth. sp. and Alcicornopteris convoluta Kidst. (Walton, Weir and Leitch, 1938, p. 1345). All that may be said with certainty is that these beds are part of the Calciferous Sandstone Series and are probably the equivalent of the Cement-stone Group. In the Edinburgh area Alcicornopteris convoluta has been found at the base of the Cement-stone Group in beds which lie conformably on the Upper Old Red Sandstone. In the Kilpatrick Hills there are sandstones, shales and thin coal seams below the lavas in Glenarbuck and near the Loch Humphrey Burn. From the latter locality Scott (1924, p. 569) has recorded Calamopitys radiata Scott, C. zonata Kidston, Bilignea solida Kidst. and B. resinosa Scott, which were found in coarse volcanic ash.

Among the numerous fragments of plants found inside the fossil hollow tree stumps of Lepidophloios wünschianus Carr. from the Calciferous Sandstone Series in the island of Arran (Walton, 1935, p. 313) are two small portions of a strobilus. These fragments are embedded in the calcite matrix, and as they are separated from one another by a distance of only a few millimetres it is possible that they are parts of one strobilus. They have suffered considerable maceration and distortion before petrification occurred. A series of over 54 peel sections transverse to the axes of the two fragments and a series of 80 longitudinal sections through one of them were prepared. The longitudinal sections were made from 4 mm. of the block of material. Each section therefore used on an average 0·05 mm. of the block.

Although there have been many accounts of the anatomy, and a small number of the function of the stomach of a variety of molluscs, there has been little or no comparative study of an organ which recent work has shown to be largely responsible for the simultaneous performance of a large number of different components of the entire physiology of the digestive tract. To make such a comparative account on the basis of previously published descriptions would, in fact, have proved an impossible task, as it has become apparent during the course of this work that adequate emphasis has never been laid upon the minutiæ of gastric structure or function, and it is upon these that a correct comparative interpretation must rest.

The volcanic rocks of Iceland have been grouped by Tyrrell and Peacock (1928) into:

3. The Recent, Post-Glacial and Late Interglacial Eruptives.

2. The Early Glacial Breccia or Palagonite Formation.

1. The Pre-Glacial Kainozoic Basalt Plateau.

Group 1 consists of nearly 10,000 feet of basalts with lignite beds, acid extrusives and acid and basic intrusions. In the east and west of Iceland the old plateau is exposed, but centrally it is down-faulted and covered with more recent tuffs and lavas.

Group 2 contains a varied assemblage of deposits comprising tuffs, breccias and lavas, moraines, boulder clays and fluvioglacial sediments (Nielsen and Noe-Nygaard, 1936 a). The lower part of this formation consists of over 2000 feet of basaltic lavas with interbedded glacial and fossiliferous deposits, and the upper part of glacial and fluvio-glacial deposits with doleritic lavas.

Group 3 is made up mainly of basaltic lavas but with occasional acid phases. In the ice-covered highlands the volcanoes have continued to produce tuffs and breccias.

In the following paper ninety-eight rocks collected by Mr F. W. Anderson from the Tertiary lavas and intrusions on the south-eastern margin of the Vatnajökull, and from the Pleistocene and Recent lavas, tuffs and sediments of Kverkfjöll Eystri on the northern margin of the ice-sheet, are described. Interest in the geology of the Vatnajökull region has been revived by several recent expeditions.

The existence of active volcanoes under the Vatnajökull, and the eruptions that occasionally break through the ice-sheet, offer unexampled opportunities for the investigation of the peculiar igneous and sedimentary products which are the results of the contest between ice and volcanism, and for the solution of the “Palagonite Problem”, with which several authors have recently dealt.