Through the kindness of Mr. A. C. Seward, M.A., F.G.S., the British Museum has been put in possession of a fine specimen of this interesting species, collected by him in the Millstone Grit of Caton, Lancashire. The species is there found associated with Nautilus [Pleuronautilus] armatus, J. de C. Sowerby, Solenocheilus [Nautilus] latiseptatus, de Koninck, Actinoceras [Orthoceras] sulcatulum, M‘Coy, etc. These I have identified in a small collection submitted to me by Mr. Seward.

The last two numbers of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society contain three communications concerning rocks which are, or are thought to be, Precambrian. Two of them are in direct attack on work of mine, and the third incidentally opposes some portion of it. The materials of any reply I may have to make are, for the most part, already published in my papers, but the bearing of these facts seems to require to be pointed out.

Taking the communications in order, the first is the Anniversary Address of the President. In this he deals, so far as my work is concerned, first with Anglesey. Sir A. Geikie states that he was not prepared by previous writings for certain results he obtained. He was much astonished to find in central Anglesey so striking a counterpart to portions of the old gneiss of the north-west of Sutherland and Ross.

When examining the Glacial drift at Nevin, Carnarvonshire, I observed in a banded silty clay occupying the top of the cliff of drift at a point between Porth Nevin and Porth Bodeilias, an excellent illustration of my theory of Normal Faulting.

The bed in question consisted of an extremely finely laminated silty clay, sometimes called book-leaf clay, the laminations being grouped in ribands about half an inch wide and six inches apart, of lighter and darker colours, presenting a striped appearance very conspicuous from the shore. In the upper part of the bed the bands were continuous, though a little wavy : the lower part of the bed, as far as it was visible above the talus of sand, was faulted as shown in the accompanying diagram (Fig. 1). These faults simulated in a remarkable manner sections of faulted coal-fields which have been drawn from actual mining exploration and measurement.

Ten years ago Charles Darwin published his last work, the result of more than forty years' observations on the habits of earthworms and the rate at which they bring up soil to the surface. To ascertain this rate, he made use of two methods. In the first place he measured the rate at which layers of lime or cinders were covered over by the spread-out castings of worms; and, later, he collected and weighed all the castings thrown up over a definite area within a given time. As is well known, the general result of his investigation was greatly to exalt our ideas of the importance of earthworms and of the work they do upon the surface of the land.

The work performed by lobworms on the surface of tidal sands seeming not less worthy of study, I made some observations on the subject during a short stay in Holy Island last August.

Considerable doubt having been expressed with regard to the occurrence of the zone of Ammonites jurensis in the neighbourhood of Northampton, much interest attaches to the discovery, by Mr. T. Jesson of Great Houghton, of the typical Ammonite in some abundance in this area. It is perhaps remarkable that there should have been any doubt about the matter, seeing that in Samuel Sharp's earlier paper Am. jurensis was recorded among the fossils from Duston, and this should have stimulated further search when the doubt arose which seems to have caused this species to be omitted from the later paper by the same author, in which some palæontological errors of the earlier paper were said to be corrected.

Davidson thus describes the external characters of this species in his Sil. Suppl. pp. 101, 102. The description is practically the same as that which he previously gave in his Sil. Mon. “Marginally of a somewhat elongated, pentagonal shape, truncated, and slightly indented in front, broadest about the middle. Tapering posteriorly. Valves almost equally convex, with a slight median depression near the front in the ventral valve. Beak strongly incurved, and truncated by a minute oval foramen; surface smooth, marked by a few concentric lines of growth. Length 6, breadth 5 lines, but the generality of specimens are much smaller.” Davidson refers to the spirals of this species both in his Sil. Mon. and in his Sil. Suppl. Sil. Mon. p. 115: “I had noticed the presence of spirals in 1847, and recorded the observation in the ‘Bulletin Soc. Géol. France,’ and Lindström has also detected them in a Gothland specimen.”