A Small stream forms the boundary between the Parishes of Wensley and Winster, on the north-west of the former; and here abouts its bed, in the Limestone Shalc; is probably about 30 feet above the Carboniferous limestone. On the Winster side, the shales form a oded slope (Whites Wood) rising 100 feet in about 200 feet, and on this side the shale is quite normal and of the black colour usual in the lower beds of this formation. On the Wensley side the ground rises more gradually, and the actual bank of the stream averages not more than about 10 feet in height. Here, an altered shale is exposed and can be traced (through the activity of moles) in the fields behind.

The Lower Old Red Sandstone of Forfar and Kincardine is upwards of 14,000 feet in thickness. No indication of a base or natural top is seen in the district. The characteristic fossils of this series have all been obtained from its middle beds within a vertical range of less than 4,000 feet. There is no palæontological evidence of the age of the beds above or below that zone. It is concluded, on physical and palæontological grounds, that the fossiliferous beds of the Orcadian area are really younger than those of Forfarshire, but there is no proof that the higher part of the Forfarshire series was not contemporaneous with the Orcadian deposits.

The folding of the Lower Old Red strata into the syncline and anticline parallel to the Highland boundary fault took place subsequently to the deposition of the whole of those strata. This folding, and denudation to the extent of 8,000 feet over the anticlinal axis, were accomplished after the deposition of the Lower and before the beginning of the Upper Old Red. The surface on which the Upper Old Red rests, in Forfarshire, is broadly horizontal, but very uneven—evidently an old land-surface.

The fossiliferous section at Meishucun of Yunnan, China, is a candidate stratotype section for the Precambrian–Cambrian boundary. Early diagenetic dolomites and phosphorites have been sampled across the boundary interval here, and in the correlated section at Maidiping in Sichuanand Valiabad in Iran, for comparison of their carbon and oxygen isotopes. This is the first such study that is calibrated by biostratigraphy in the interval from the earliest (pre-Tommotian) skeletal fossils to trilobites. Although negative oxygen isotopes indicate a diagenetic signal in the Zhongyicun Member and basal Badaowan Member phosphorites, two carbon-isotope cycles are clearly present and can be correlated in dolomitic rocks between the two sections. The first appearance datum (FAD) of the earliest skeletal assemblage (zone I, Marker A), FAD of diverse micromolluscs (zone II, Marker B) and FAD of Chinese trilobites (zones IV, V) and Marker C appear at similar points on the carbon-isotope curve in the two Chinese sections. Integrated carbon-isotope and early skeletal fossil biostratigraphy is shown to have the potential to correlate further afield, with sections in Iran, as well as with India, Siberia, Morocco and Australia. We suggest that a distinctive positive excursion provides a global marker for the interval between Marker B and C in China and just below the Tommotian Stage of Siberia.

Five faunal lists of conodonts recovered from isolated Viséan outcrops in the north of England are presented. The fauna of the Bowland Shale at Burnsall, Yorkshire, and that of the Orionastraea Bed at Bordley, Yorkshire, are representative of the Gnathodus mononodosus Assemblage Zone. The fauna of the Bollandoceras hodderense Bed (B1), and that of a limestone near the top of the Worston Shale Group (B2) at Little Mearley, Lancashire, represent the Mestognathus beckmanni-Gnathodus bilineatus Assemblage Zone. The presence of conodonts in the reef limestone of Swinden, Yorkshire, is also noted.

Reptilian bones, first observed by Mr. C. I. Gardiner in 1935, are found in two quarries in the Chipping Norton Limestone (top of Inferior Oolite, fusca and zigzag hemerae). These two quarries are the New Park Quarry, about 2½ miles N.W. of Stow-on-the-Wold, and the Oakham Quarry which lies about a mile W.N.W. of Little Compton. The bones occur in a hard cream-coloured limestone which is worked for road-metal. Fossils other than reptilian remains are not common, but among those found in the New Park Quarry is an ammonite determined by Mr. J. W. Tutcher as Parkinsonia neuffensis Oppel. The great majority of the bones come from the New Park Quarry, but the Oakham Quarry yielded certain of the crocodilian, theropod, and sauropod bones.

John Wesley Judd was born at Portsmouth February 18th, 1840. His father belonged to a branch of an old Kentish family that had been settled for several generations in the Isle of Wight. His mother was the daughter of a Scotchman who had “come South” from the ancient kingdom of Fife. The Christian name given to the subject of this sketch was the result of an attempt on the part of his parents to find a compromise between the two national religions in which they had been respectively brought up.

Two years ago the French savans, Messrs. Lartet and Christy, laid before the Academy of Paris an account of their discoveries in the Dordogne, which proved the existence in that district of very ancient settlements of wild races of men, who kept herds of rein-deer. Since then, up to the present time, no further proofs have come to light, either in France or Germany, of the extraordinary fact that this animal—the existence of which is now limited within the 70th degree of north latitude—ever lived so far south as our own districts. The account we have now to give will probably therefore be read with great interest.

I cannot conclude this paper without remarking that none of the views therein are held dogmatically, and expressing the hope that former observers will renew their attention, and fresh ones take up the investigation of this complicated, yet interesting area. The difficulties are great, among which is the origin of the banded structure, in the rocks herein dealt with, which in my next paper I shall try to explain on the grounds of segregation, arising from, or taking place during the cooling of the common magma out of which all these rocks seem to me to have been formed.