That broad trench through the Palestine Highlands, an ancient highway and battlefield of nations—the plain of Esdraelon or the valley of Megiddo, together with the plain of Acre—has for long presented to me a difficult problem in Physical Geology, for it seemed inexplicable by subaerial denudation under existing conditions. Its floor varies roughly from five to eight miles in breadth; running approximately from south-east to north-west, it is bounded on the more western side by the limestone mountains of Samaria and on the more eastern by those of Galilee. The former descend from the ridge of Carmel (1,742 feet at highest) with a fairly steep escarpment, which becomes a little less regular as we follow it to the bastion-mass of Mount Gilboa; the latter correspond in their general outlines with those of the eastern portion of Samaria, but the advance of a lower spur towards the south-west divides the plain of Esdraelon from that of Acre, by a kind of strait in which, so far as I could see, there is but little level ground on either side of the Kishon. This spur, however, of the northern hills, hardly does more than interrupt the floor of the Kishon valley, for above it the great trench is continued between two hill masses, much of these ranging from thirteen to sixteen hundred feet above sea-level. Beyond the strait the upper basin (plain of Esdraelon) quickly broadens out, extending towards the south-east for about fifteen or sixteen miles, where it is divided into two arms by Jebel Duhy (Little Hermon) (1,690 feet), which is thus isolated from Tabor (1,846 feet) on the north, and from Gilboa (1,698 feet) on the south; a broad, rather shallow, grassy valley descending from the last-named mass to lose itself in the plain.

Mr. A. L. Du Toit, of the Cape Geological Commission, who has been for some months engaged in studying the Stormberg beds in the eastern part of the Colony, has been fortunate in making a number of discoveries of very great interest to the palæontologist. Among Vertebrates his most important finds have been the remains of two small crocodiles.

The first specimen, which was discovered by Mr. A. Isted in the Cave Sandstone at Funnystone, Barkly East, consists of the impressions of the under sides of most of the upper bones of the skull and of most of the dorsal armour. There are also preserved the remains of a scapula, a humerus, a radius and ulna, a femur, and a number of ribs. A restoration of the skull is shown in Fig. 1. When complete it probably measured 130 mm. in length, and the length of the whole crocodile was probably about 600 mm. Though the skull is too imperfectly preserved to show what are the relations to the already known families, enough is preserved to show that the crocodile belongs to the suborder Amphicœlia of Owen (= Mesosuchia, Huxley). The skull is characterised by the very large size of the squamosal bones, by the moderate size of the supra-temporal openings, by the nasals taking little part in the formation of the snout, and by each maxillary having only a few large teeth—’ probably 6 or 8.

I am glad that my paper on the Coddon Hill beds, published in the Geological Magazine, August, 1904, pp. 392–403, has aroused criticism, and could only have wished that Dr. Vaughan had been familiar with the Carboniferous sequence of the Pennine area and Belgium. The matter is not one to be solved by the casual appearance in any definite bed of a few Brachiopods, at one only of the many horizons at which they are known to occur in other localities, for the whole of the fossils, which are quoted by Dr. Vaughan as the foundation for his argument that the Coddon Hill Beds are low down in the Carboniferous sequence, are equivocal as far as their value as zone indices goes. And on the other hand, Dr. Vaughan completely ignores those fossils which are unequivocal and which denote a well-recognised horizon, and curiously enough, too, correspond with a marked change in lithological character of the Carboniferous sequence. In the first place, I do not see where Dr. Vaughan found any statement in Mr. Howe's and my paper on the Pendleside group at Pendle Hill (Q. J. G. S., vol. lvii) that the Pendleside series are the equivalents of the Millstone Grit of South Wales and the Mendip areas. The table on the page quoted (p. 388) distinctly shows that we consider the Pendleside series to lie universally below beds equivalent to Millstone Grit, and we do not mention the series of the Bristol and Mendip area because we were not well enough acquainted with that district to do so.

Sedgwick and Murchison, the Rev. D. Williams, and Dr. Holl, taking the Plymouth limestones as a middle division, placed them below the rocks to the south and above those to the north. The prevalent southerly dips of schistosity were regarded as ample evidence of a downward succession proceeding northward.

The Staddon grits and other Lower Devonian rocks were thus placed above the Middle Devonian, and the slates in which I have at various times since 1892 found Upper Devonian fossils (between Menbeniot and St. Budeaux) were relegated to a position below the Middle Devonian.

It appears to be a common belief that there are two Old Red Sandstones in Scotland, and only two, which are referred to respectively as the Upper and the Lower. It is generally recognised that neither of these can be paralleled with any one of the subdivisions of the Devonian Rocks, properly so-called; though the fact that the Scottish rocks in question occupy a stratigraphical position somewhere between the top of the Silurian Rocks and the base of the Carboniferous System places their Devonian age beyond the possibility of a doubt. The Upper Old Red is considered by most persons to graduate upwards into the Carboniferous Rocks, which, by the way, is by no means universally the case. It is also stated, with equal confidence, and with as little regard to the facts, that the Lower Old Red Sandstone graduates downward into the Silurian Rocks, which it certainly does not, as will be shown more fully in another part of this paper. Furthermore, it is still commonly believed that bands yielding Silurian graptolites alternate with the base of the Lower Old Red Sandstone, and that Lower Carboniferous fossils occur in bands of rock interstratified with true Upper Old Red Sandstone. Both of these ideas are well known to have been due to errors of observation; yet the statements in question, having found their way into the papers set by examiners, seem destined to die a hard death, and therefore need to be contradicted.

It is remarkable that in this district so accessible to geologists and visited by so many observers, the presence of these beds has not hitherto been noted. When it is understood that the point where the main area occurs is only between 8 and 9 kilometres from Cairo, and lies immediately to the north of the Petrified Forest—a place visited by nearly all the travellers who come to Cairo—one is apt to doubt whether geologists have ever seriously examined this district.