During the earliest periods concerning which we have historical records in Southern Europe, Vesuvius was certainly inactive, its true character, indeed, long remaining wholly unsuspected; nor do the eruptions of Etna at this epoch appear to have been of such a character as to have powerfully arrested the attention and excited the imaginations of the oldest inhabitants of the district. Far otherwise was it, however, with the volcanos of the Lipari Islands; in these the manifestations of igneous activity had been so constant and striking, that priests, poets, and philosophers had successively associated the locality with their most marvellous stories.

The interesting story of the discovery of these enormous masses by Prof. Nordenskjöld is already known to the readers of this Magazine through a translation of his original memoir. While exploring in Danish Greenland in 1870, his attention was directed to the possibility that meteorites might be met with in Disko Island, by the accidental discovery of a block of meteoric iron in some ballast which had been taken in at the old whaling-station at Fortuna Bay, near Godhavn, and he urged the Greenlanders to search the district for masses of that metal.

Since the appearance of the first part of this paper, I have had, through the kindness of M. Deshayes and Prof. Gaudry, an opportunity of examining the original specimens in D'Orbigny's cabinet in the Jardin des Plantes, and am enabled to add the following to the list of species included in Group 1. They are all in the Prodrome:—