Description.—Specimen from the Coralline Oolite of Pickering (Leckenby Collection).

Shell moderately elongate, conical, solid. Spire formed of an angle very nearly regular. The whorls are numerous and of moderate height. The posterior whorls in this specimen have suffered from abrasion. They are nearly flat, and the ornaments were apparently similar to those in the central part of the shell. The ornaments on the anterior whorls, if ever they existed, are for the most part obliterated, but the nodular character of the rim at the base of each whorl is still shown; these whorls are moderately excavated. The ornaments on the portions preserved in the centre are as follows. Each whorl is slightly depressed in the middle, and closely fitted on to the next by a raised nodular rim: that rim which is at the base of each whorl is by far the most nodular. Five transverse rows of granulations, the three centre ones being the strongest, fill up the space between the rims.

The name serpentine has been applied by many authors with so much vagueness that it appears to me desirable to lose no opportunity of examining any rock bearing this title, and to record briefly the result. A considerable number of patches of serpentine, generally of limited extent, are laid down on Ritter von Hauer’s Map of the Eastern part of the Alps, some of which also appear on that of Professor Theobald (sheet xx. of the Federal Map of Switzerland). Several of these I was able to examine, sufficiently for my purpose, during a visit to the district last summer.

I am indebted to the kindness of Dr. Julius von Haast, F.R.S., Director of the Canterbury Museum, New Zealand, for the specimen which is the subject of this note. The little packet of fragments was labelled Moa Hunter, Kitchen Midden Sandhills, near Moa Cave, Point Sumner, New Zealand.

In former papers on the Pliocene and Pleistocene Beds near Cromer, an account has been given of the character and succession of these deposits. I have since obtained fuller information with regard to the beds beneath the Boulder-clay, and now give a more complete table, and also venture to propose the subjoined classification of the newer Tertiaries, reserving all details for the Survey Memoir.

We have surveyed the distribution of Mammoths' remains in Siberia, especially of those in which the soft parts have been preserved, and have found them distributed along its whole length from the Kara Sea to the peninsula of the Chukchi. We have seen that these remains are found in large numbers, and that the further north we travel, the more abundant do they become. That while in Central Siberia they are comparatively unfrequent, as we near the Arctic border-land, the river banks and tundras teem more and more with them, until in the Bear Islands and the islands of New Siberia the ground is largely composed of the bones of Mammoths and the associated animals. These very abnormal facts, which are now familiar enough, have naturally attracted a great amount of speculation, and the question has arisen on many sides, How came they here? As we have seen, the unsophisticated natives explain the presence among them of carcases of huge animals with their flesh intact, by the elementary theory that the animals are still alive and live underground, dying only when exposed to the sun light.