IN the course of a general survey of the Glacial deposits of East Anglia it has been found necessary to investigate the mineral content of a large number of samples of the well-known “Chalky Boulder-clay” over a considerable area of Norfolk and Suffolk.

THE finding of a small pebble of fine-grained quartz-dolerite in an exposure of the Upper Brockram in George Gill, near Appleby, by Professor Arthur Holmes in 1925 and its identification with the rock of the Whin Sill led to the direct establishment of the timeof injection of the Whin Sill and related dykes as post-Carboniferous and pre-Upper Brockram (1928, pp. 532–4). Since 1925 parties of students from the Durham Colleges’ Department of Geology have made each year a careful search for similar pebbles not only in the George Gill exposures but in a number of others in the Brackenber Moor neighbourhood. These efforts have not been rewarded with any success until the present year, when a party under my guidance made a thorough examination of the George Gill Brockram and Mr. A. R. Leathley, of Hatfield College, had the good fortune to hammer out a pebble of doleritic aspect.

SINCE the publication of my paper on the fauna of the Anthracolithic Limestone of Oomi-mura, Province of Echigo, Central Japan, I have added to my collection fresh material from this locality, collected either by myself or by others. Among this is an astraeiform coral to which I wish to draw attention since such corals are everywhere uncommon in the Carboniferous and, as far as Japan is concerned, is the first to be recorded. The specimen is only a small fragment, its polished transverse surface measuring not more than 2 cm. by 2 cm. Unfortunately the coral is in an unsatisfactory state of preservation so that its structural details are difficult to decipher. However, from a careful examination of the polished surface and of thin sections cut from the coral I am inclined to regard it as a species of Orionastraea Smith, a genus which hitherto has only been known to occur in the Carboniferous rocks of the British Isles.

IT is noteworthy that some analcite-bearing diabase has already been collected by Mr. Y. Deguchi from the Pescadoles Islands and the distribution of the same kind of rock was also noticed by Dr. B. Kotō in the Taihoku district many years ago. Little is known of the occurrence of alkaline rocks in Formosa, for the investigation of these rocks has not been carried out by any geologist. When the writer moved to Formosa, his attention was especially attracted to these rocks, both petrologically and geologically. The work was begun three years ago when he first found very interesting specimens of analcite-bearing rocks at Rokkutsu and published some brief notes thereupon. The present paper embodies further study of analcite-bearing rocks from Rokkutsu.

DURING 1931 the writer had occasion to make several journeys across the western part of the coastal belt of British Somaliland, southward from Zeilah to Buramo, near the Abyssinian frontier.

FOR more than twenty-five years the compiler of this bibliography has been deeply interested in the tectonic history of the British Isles: for the greater part of this time he has also been struck by the absence of any adequate and annotated treatment of the subject, since the appearance of the third edition of Jukes-Browne's Building of the British Isles, 1911. (The so-called 4th edition of this work, dated 1922, appears to be merely an unrevised reprint of the 3rd edition.) In 1929 this want was in part supplied by the publication of The Physiographical Evolution of Britain, by Dr. L. J. Wills. Even in this admirable work, however, the stress is on physiography rather than on tectonics, and many of the more important writings on this side of the subject are not referred to. In the Handbook of the Geology of Great Britain, which appeared in the same year, the exiguous section on “Morphology” includes no bibliography, while the whole scheme of treatment is in the main palaeontological, and little help on the tectonic aspect is to be obtained from the text of most of the sections. The present publication may in a sense be regarded as a supplement to that work.

The island of North Rona bears, on the whole, a close resemblance in structure to the adjacent mainland, with certain distinct minor differences.

The evidence shows that the island probably came under the influences of the quaternary ice, as was suggested by Geikie.

A SMALL Arthropod was discovered by one of us (S. H. J.) in the course of investigations of the Coal Measures of the area around Ammanford, Carmarthenshire, on the north crop of the South Wales Coalfield. It is preserved in a fine grained, light blue shale from the roof of the Little Vein (lower part of the Pulchra Zone of Davies and Trueman), at the Blaina Colliery, Pantyffnon, about one mile south-west of Ammanford. The specimen is in the collection of the University College of Swansea, No. A. 152.

EXCAVATIONS for a new road in Whiteacre Copse, north-west of Compton, Surrey, have afforded an exceptionally good opportunity for collecting fossils from the Lower Gault of this district. Unfortunately, though the cutting passes through the whole thickness of the formation, it is very shallow in the higher parts, and no specimens could be obtained from the Upper Gault. But three unrecognizable impressions of ammonites were seen at the base of this Upper Gault. The tilt of the strata here is 30° N.

IN this paper it is proposed to give a brief account of the petrography of the Kainozoic igneous rocks collected by Mr. J. M. Wordie during the Cambridge Expedition to East Greenland led by him in 1926. A small collection of alkaline igneous rocks, but of less certain age, was also made from Cape Parry, and is briefly dealt with in this paper. As Mr. Wordie has written a short note on the geology of the Tertiary igneous rocks in his geographical paper, and as Dr. H. G. Backlund intends shortly to publish a much more comprehensive account of Tertiary igneous activity and rocks in East Greenland than is possible on the basis of the materials collected by the Cambridge Expedition, this paper aims only at making a brief record of the petrographical characters of the collection, and especially at recording three new chemical analyses, two of the Kainozoic basalts, and one of a riebeckitetrachyte from the Cape Parry alkaline complex. For the most recent account of the general geology of East Greenland, and for a connected summary of the Kainozoic igneous rocks collected by other expeditions, the reader is referred to memoirs by L. Koch and H. G. Backlund.

THE most generally accepted explanation of the formation of mountains has been that of a slowly contracting earth with a solid crust accommodating itself to a shrinking interior. As the assumed shrinking proceeds, so the crust has to fold and fracture in order to occupy a smaller area. Such movements, particularly folding, would be facilitated by the hot glassy substratum on which the crust is believed to rest. Now it might be supposed on general grounds that wherever the crust was at all uniform in texture some regular pattern of folds or fractures would be formed. Since the floors of the oceans, particularly the Pacific, are believed to be fairly uniform, and to consist largely of basaltic material, these should show the pattern well; but the continents in spite of their more varied constitution should also show something of a regular pattern. Therefore if one could ascertain what would be the pattern of a contracting sphere, then this should be tracable in the tectonic structures of the earth’s crust, and if the thermal contraction hypothesis is the real cause of these structures, in this way it should be possible to apply a crucial test to the validity of the hypothesis.