In commencing the proceedings of the second Annual Meeting of the Mineralogical Society of Great Britain and Ireland, allow me to express the pleasure which it gives me to be present here to-day, and my regret that I was not able to attend the first meeting last year at Glasgow. I feel it to be incumbent on me to give some opening address, but at the same time it must not be long, since many other subjects claim attention.

In the first place I think I may well congratulate the Society on its present condition, and contrast it with some of the predictions made little more than a year ago. We were told by men well-known in the mineralogical world that no such Society as our own could possibly be established—that, even if it could, it would be of no use, unless it published a Journal—which it most certainly never could afford.

In making an examination of some samples of Phosphorite, recently discovered in Southern Russia, I was much struck by the unusual appearance of the substance, and after a closer examination came to the conclusion that it was a new form of the mineral, and ought to be brought before the notice of this society, in order that its occurrence and physical structure might be recorded and discussed.

The mineral which forms the subject of this paper occurs in rounded masses, varying in size from 5 to 9 inches in diameter. The outer surface is smooth and presents an appearance highly suggestive of the form being due to the action of running water, but upon fracturing several of these balls I found in every instance that they were c6mposed of a number of fibres radiating from the centre, of small size, and of a blueish grey colour, having a hardness of about 4.

The district to which the following notes refer is contained in sheets 26 and 27 of the one inch Ordnance Survey Maps, and embraces an area of about 985 square miles, the northern boundary being formed by the Bristol channel, and that on the south by a line drawn through the town of Okehampton. The rocks composing this district belong to the Devonian and Carboniferous systems, with the exception of a small portion of new red sandstone and a patch of Greensand, occupying a few acres. The two older systems present a regular sequence of beds from north to south, which, interrupted by the granite of Dartmoor, are represented to a greater or less extent by a similar series in the southern portion of the county.