Was there a deluge? It is not to advocate any new reconciliation theory we ask this question; it is not to urge afresh some supposed contact with a comet (if we have just passed through the tail of one, at most the harm we got was a few heavy showers); nor is it to show that periodical inundations or oceanic overwhelmings of each hemisphere—north and south—alternately take place every few thousand years. Probably they do. But neither fifty deluges, nor ten thousand, nor a hundred thousand, would make one deluge—A DELUGE. Our purpose then is, to inquire whether there might not have been, once upon a time, a physical natural cause for a deluge. As the crime of the sinner is often the cause of the amendment of the law, so the bold speculator, breaking out from the trammels of established dicta and the fashionable propriety of a safe reserve, may, as Macdougal Stuart in his daring ride across Australia opened out a luxuriant country where geographers predicted a sandy desert, likewise break in upon glorious fields before unknown. We have so many safe respectabilities in geology that an erratic notion now and then cannot do much harm, if it do no good. When we look up to the moon, what do we see? Great ocean cavities and no water in them. It is of no use to say it is ALL gathered up on the other side. We cannot believe that.

Mention is made by Mr. Hull, F.G.S., in the second edition of his useful work on the coal-fields of England, of a deep sinking for coal on the estate of the Arley Pottery and Fire-brick Company, situated at Shatterford, five miles north of Bewdley. This work, though unfortunately ending in failure, and leading to the abandonment of the enterprise, deserves a prominent ppsition in the annals of coalmining, chiefly because the section obtained may be regarded as an index to nearly the whole of the coal measures of the forest of Wyre. Through the courtesy of Mr. John M. Fellows, manager of works to the late company, I am enabled to place on record the particulars of the shaft-sinking. To illustrate it, I have sketched the geological construction of the district for three miles in a line north-west to south-east, adding a section due north and south of the near-lying anticline of Trimpley, where the upper tilestones crop out. While the work of sinking was in progress, I obtained daily intelligence either through visits or by communications from Mr. Fellows, to whose obliging conduct in giving me every facility for scientific investigation I am greatly indebted.

The specimens obtained from each bed were particularly examined by me, and the fire-clays, which, from their number formed an important part of the series, were of a highly interesting character. The fossils obtained do not require special notice, no new fern being met with, and the Sigillariæ, &c, being few in number and badly preserved. These in every case lay prostrated in the strata, and appeared to have been drifted.