During one of the excursions arranged by the International Geological Congress held in Sweden, 1910, we visited, under the leadership of Professor Högbom, a group of islands skirting the shore north of Sundsvall, on the Gulf of Bothnia. Among these islands Alnö and Långörsholmen are of particular interest on account of a complex of alkali igneous rocks forming the whole of the latter and the northern corner of the former. It is to this small but highly interesting group of rocks that I wish to call the attention of the reader, since apart from the short but convincing ‘guide’ prepared by Professor Högbom (1), scarcely anything has been written on the subject in the English language. The expedition was very skilfully planned, and we were thus enabled to visit several critical exposures and collect numerous specimens for microscopic study.

In the agglomerate of the volcanic necks of Eastern Fifeshire are incorporated, as has long been known, numerous fragments of sedimentary rock. These, it is generally believed, represent the broken-up remains of the strata which at some former time occupied their sites. Many of them have obviously been subjected to excessively high temperatures, others show no sign whatever of igneous action. Thus, occasionally we find quartzites and lydian stone representing what once must have been sandstones amd clay shale; or, again, the constituent layers of a sandy or carbonaceous shale may be seen to be still adherent and so little altered as to display on a freshly exposed surface admirably preserved plant-remains. Lime-stone blocks also occur sometimes converted into marble, frequently unchanged; in the latter case, exhibiting on their weathered exteriors the remains of those organisms which give at once the clue to the conditions accompanying the deposition of their parent stratum. It is with special reference to these limestone fragments that this note has been written and particularly to those occurring in one vent—the well-known “Rock and Spindle”—a mile and a half to the east of St. Andrews.

The pillow-laves are a group of basic igneous rocks that occur, in our experience, only as submarine flows, and very frequently exhibit ‘pillow-structure’. A lava-flow of this type is composed of sack-shaped masses, globular or elongated, and varying in size. The external surface of the pillows may be compact, but in their interior there are numerous cavities often concentrically arranged. First described in Britain by Nicholas Whitley (1), and figured also by De la Beche (2), they have become generally known through the work of Teall (3), Raisin (4), Reid and Dewey (5), and their importance among the Palæozoic eruptive rocks of Britain is now well established.

Just before my departure from Tokyo to Europe, in 1908, my attention was called, by the kindness of MR. Gordon Yamakawa, to a fossil fauna from a cutting along the Yamanote line of the circum-Tokyo railway, near the Tabata station. It was seven years ago, when the railway line was still in process of construction, that Mr. Yamakawa formed a collection of fossils, consisting exclusively of molluscan remains. Of special interest is the abundant occurrence of Tellina venulosa, Schrenk, in the shell-sand, and as its presence is really of exceptional interest in the environs of Tokyo we visited the place together soon afterwards. The present brief account is contributed partly for the purpose of recording the observations of this diligent young student of fossils, whose lamentable and too early death took place last autumn, during my absence in Europe, and partly with the intention of interesting others in the further study of the Pleistocene and Pliocene geology of Tokyo, which though apparently quite simple, contains many interesting and unsettled geological questions.