Without the slightest wish to interfere with the management, or any desire to criticize the past doings of Natural History Societies and Field-Clubs, we may be permitted, without any imputation of meddling, to suggest how much good work the forthcoming year may produce, through a little forethought and pre-arrangement. Spring time will now soon be upon us, and the time for field-excursions will have come on again. Would it not be well if the Councils of Societies organized their arrangements with a view to some practical ends?

In the districts of crystalline and metamorphic rocks, examples of transitional states bearing on the great origin-of-granite question might be designated as one of the topics of inquiry, and members solicited to search for and study examples, and to send notices of them to the Societies before the excursions were decided upon. In the districts of the Secondary rocks, examples of unconformability and thinning out, and the intercalation of special deposits, would also form a most valuable subject of inquiry.

Palaeontology, as such, should not be neglected: and by selecting given genera or families of fish, mammals, or mollusca, and tracing the ranges of species upwards and downwards stratigraphically through the separate beds of the various deposits of any geological formation or formations, the most valuable data for geological progress would be obtained; and contemporaneously with this investigation, another, devoted to the geographical extent at each horizon of the same species, should also be carried on.