Since the publication of the notes on some new fishes from the English Purbeck and Wealden Beds five years ago, the Rev. W. R. Andrews, of Teffont, has kindly entrusted to the writer for examination a fine series of Purbeckian fishes from the Vale of Wardour. All the members of this fauna are remarkably diminutive, compared with those met with in the corresponding formation in Dorsetshire; but nearly all the species are well preserved, and some are sufficiently novel to be worthy of detailed description. The Pycnodont genus Mesodon, which was first described from the English Purbeck in the paper already cited, is here represented by one or two more forms; the Lepidosteoid Macrosemius is now first definitely recorded as a British fossil; additional examples of Pleuropholis extend previous information of that genus; new specimens of Leptolepis Brodiei add to the known specific characters of this fish; and the opportunity is now afforded for publishing a figure of the small Palæoniscid, Coccolepis andrewsi.

During last August the writers made a short stay in Switzerland and the Savoy, with a view to examine the structure of the ice of several of the larger glaciers. For this purpose a rough polariscope was used. It was so designed that a sheet of ice about two inches square, made very thin by cutting and melting, could be placed between the polarizer and analyzer. Notwithstanding that the thin slide so prepared, and held between glass plates, melted away rather rapidly, we succeeded in making a number of drawings of sections cut from the ice at different parts of the glacier, and at various angles with the line of motion. In some cases, however, where the structure was very fine-grained, the samples melted away before they could be sketched.

The phenomena to be observed in this special rock seem to me to strikingly bear out some of the ideas and views I expressed in my former paper, when I assumed “that under such conditions, solutions of mineral constituents would be formed of great density, amounting to something like an ‘aqueous fusion’ of the substances involved, and that these solutions could solidify to amorphous and more or less indefinite compounds, or would be capable, under some conditions of cooling, of giving rise to definite minerals.”