There has recently been exhibited in the Gallery of Fossil Mammals at the Natural History Museum a restored skeleton of Stenomylus hitchcooki, Loomis, a ‘gazelle-camel’ from the Lower Miocene of Nebraska. This specimen (M 10969), which has been mounted in relief by Mr. L. E. Parsons, jun., includes portions of the skeletons of two individuals, but much of the dorsal region of the vertebral column and the ribs have been restored in plaster. The remains are from the Lower Harrison Beds (Lower Miocene) near A gate Springs, Co. Nebraska, where upwards of forty skeletons were collected in a small area. Many were complete and lay in such a position that they are believed to be the remains of a herd overtaken by floods and drowned.

The peculiar features presented by the upper or land-surface portions of some deposits, or rather those portions of certain deposits which are now, or have been in times past, land-surfaces, have engaged the attention of many geologists. Most of those who have studied them are satisfied that some features which they often show are not now being produced in this country, and they are attributed by many observers to the action of different climatic conditions to those which at present exist.

In the course of a visit to North Wales last summer my friend Mr. Ivor E. Davies, of Penmaenmawr, called my attention to a mauve mineral, forming thin veins, in the intrusive porphyrite of Penmaenmawr Mountain. The specimens containing the veins were not seen in place, but were collected from the waste-heaps of the Graig Lwyd Quarries, the most easterly of the large quarries that are making such deadly inroads into the heart of the mountain. Careful search on the waste-heaps enabled us to collect further specimens, and in some of these the mineral had built in fissures and cracks somewhat crowded, very sharp-edged crystals of tabular development.

In a recent paper on the Marble District of the Apuan Alps or Carrara Mountains I showed that the gneissose schists which form the nucleus of that range, and upon which rests the Triassic marmiferous formation, are, not of Archæan, but, upon irrefutable palæontological evidence, of Palæozoic age, and that, upon equally conclusive lithological and stratigraphical evidence, they must be assigned to the later part of that period, that is, to the Lower Permian. The former conclusion was first arrived at in the course of the geological survey of the range by Lotti and Zaccagna and upon the palæontological authority of the late Professor Meneghini; the latter conclusion was chiefly the result of the striking analogy, first pointed out by Zaccagna, between the stratigraphical sequence and lithological characteristics of the Apuan Alps and the Montgioie range of the Maritime Alps which forms the divide between Southern Piémont and the Western Italian Riviera.

The following analyses were made to ascertain the magnitude of local variations in the St. Bees Sandstone of West Cumberland. It will be convenient for this purpose to consider the district as follows:—

The area south of St. Bees, as far as Calder Bridge.

The area north of Maryport, as far as Wigton.

From a long and careful study of the Brachiopoda I am led to offer some observations upon the two recently published papers by Dr. J. Allan Thomson which have appeared in this Magazine. In the case of Dallina I cannot agree with Dr. Thomson regarding the type of folding. He considers D. septigera (the genotype) and D. raphaelis as dorsally biplicate, D. floridana as dorsally uniplicate. Now dorsal biplication is brought about by the dorsal sulcus being superimposed upon a single dorsal fold. In D. septigera, as well as in D. floridana, a broad ventral sulcus is superimposed upon a dominant ventral fold; these two species, therefore, are, in my opinion, ventrally biplicate (as in Magellania flavescens and some others).

In 1902 I published a paper, the outcome of several years' observation, on certain phenomena associated with the glacial deposits of the Cleveland area, which I attributed to the former presence of a series of temporary lakes and lakelets upheld in the recesses of the hills by the margin of a great ice-sheet occupying the greater part of the North Sea. This interpretation met with so wide an acceptance, even by those geologists familiar with the district who had previously attributed the glacial deposits to a marine origin, that during the succeeding thirteen years I have steadfastly refrained from replying to criticism, hoping by this abstention to keep the issues unclouded by a controversy that might at any stage develop an acerbity not always lacking in earlier discussions.