This paper gives the results of an investigation at the Imperial Institute of a carnotite-bearing specimen received from South Australia.

The material represented by the specimen is described by Mr. H. Y. L. Brown, Government Geologist of South Australia, as occurring about 2 miles SSW. of Teesdale's dam and about 20 miles ESE. of Olary railway station. He remarks : ‘The ore occurs as yellow and greenish-yellow incrustations and powder on the faces, joints, and cavities of a lode formation, which consists of magnetic titaniferous iron, magnetite, &c., and quartz in association with black mica (biotite) . . . . . . The outcrops traverse metamorphic gneissic micaceous granite and granite schist, into which dykes of granite and diorite have been intruded.’

The mineral carminite was first described by F. von Sandberger in 1850 in a paper which appeared in Poggendorff's Annalen, entitled ‘Carminspath, ein neues Mineral aus der Ordnung der Arseniate’. It occurred near Horhausen, Rhenish Prussia, forming clusters of fine needles of a carmine- to tile-red colour, implanted on quartz, limonite, and beudantite, and accompanied by pyrolusite, clear crystals of mimetite, and an undetermined yellow, earthy mineral. In a subsequent paper in 1858, ‘Ueber den Carminspath,’ he gave the precise locality as the Luise mine, Horhausen, Rhenish Prussia ; and a quantitative analysis, on 0.068 gram by R. Müller, showed the mineral to be an anhydrous arsenate of iron and lead : As2O5, 49.11 ; Fe2O5, 30.29 ; PbO, 24.55 = 108.95. A trace of phosphoric acid was also present.

Although the mineral gyrolite has long been known to occur in the British Isles, namely in the basalt lavas of Skye, Mull, and the Treshnish Islands, &c., off the west coast of Scotland, and has more recently been described from the cliffs between Ardtornish Bay and the fault of Dearg Allt in Argyllshire on the mainland, no instance of its occurrence in the lavas of the north of Ireland has hitherto been recorded.

The examination, however, of a large number of specimens collected both for me and by myself during the past year and a half has shown that the mineral, though occurring in small quantity relative to the other zeolites with which it is associated, is fairly widely distributed throughout the harder lavas in the neighbourhood of Belfast.

A Sample of supposed ‘vegetable asbestos’ obtained in the west of the province of Süchwan, China, was forwarded in 1907 by Mr. J. H. Bristow, the British Consul at Chungking. It was later reported by Mr. H. Phillips, the British Consul at Chungking, that the so-called ‘vegetable’ asbestos previously mentioned ‘is found in crevices between rocks in the districts of Lei Po T'ing and P'ing Shang Hsien, in the prefecture of Sui-fu.’ The author has recently been informed that it occurs along the length of the Yangtse-kiang generally, from Sui-fu to the Huili-chou neighbourhood—i.e., along the Süchwan-Yunnan border on the outskirts of the Man Tzu country.

Early in 1909 a small quantity of fine sand was brought to the writer from a big Chinese-owned mine at Rotan Dahan, in the district of Kinta, the leading tin-producing district of Perak and, indeed, of any of the Federated States. The sand was a concentrate, and had been obtained in the final washing of the rough tin-ore concentrates, whereby the heavier impurities, generally referred to locally as ‘amang’, are separated from the cassiterite. In this case, however, the Chinese miner found that there was a reddish mineral present which he could not separate from the cassiterite. This proved to be native copper, and the mode of occurrence is of sufficient interest to watTant a brief description of this and other samples of ore from the same mine and an adjoining mine working on the same deposit.

The mining village of New Brancepeth, in the parish of Brandon and Byshottles, is situated in the Durham coalfield at a distance of four miles to the west of the city of Durham. One of the faults which intersect the sandstones, shales, and coal-seams (the Harvey, Busty, and Brockwell seams) of the Coal Measures at this place has, at its eastern end, an east to west direction with a downthrow of 120 feet and a hade of 20° to the south. Along this portion of its course the fault is of the nature of a fissure-vein, with a width varying from a few inches to 16 feet. The material filling the vein consists mainly of barytes. In places, especially where the walls of the vein are of sandstone, the pure white, massive barytes extends throughout from one sharply-defined cheek to the other.

In October 1907 two mineral-specimens were sent for investigation to the Mineral Department of the British Museum by Mr R. T. Hancock, of Cardiff, who had brought them back from South Africa. On examination they proved to contain patches of olivine and troilite and particles of nickeliferous iron, and appeared therefore to be of meteoric origin. According to Mr. Hancock two ‘boulders’ of similar material had been found, 100 yards apart and a foot below the surface, in gravel near Simondium Station on the Paarl to French Hock line, Cape Colony. These ‘boulders’, which were as much as a foot in diameter, were broken up into small fragments by the finders, who supposed the bright particles of metallic iron exposed on the fractured surfaces to be silver.

Amongst the rock-specimens from Co. Limerick belonging to the Allport Collection in the British Museum, a. specimen of basalt from Rathjordan, Co. Limerick, attracted attention by the fact that, in thin slices under the microscope, it showed small, round sections of isotropic material containing central and octagonally arranged, marginal inclusions, and thus resembling leucite. The rock from Rathjordan has been described by Hull and by Allport. According to Allport the rock is a columnar, fine-grained, black basalt which occurs interbedded with ashes, and consists of ‘innumerable small grains of augite and magnetite set in an amorphous glass, the whole forming a matrix in which serpentinous pseudomorphs of olivine and felspar are porphyritically imbedded’.

The history of famous diamonds has always been surrounded with mystery and uncertainty, and this is no less the case with the recently-discovered ‘Cullinan’, by far tile largest of all diamonds, which was found in the Premier diamond mine, near Pretoria, in the Transvaal, on January 25, 1905. Whilst it is now no longer possible to arrive at the exact facts respecting the earlier-found stones, it is desirable to place on record any definite information respecting the more noteworthy stones found in our own time.