Our venerable friend Professor Prestwich, who has now attained his 82nd year, may serve as an admirable illustration of the law of “the survival of the fittest,” for years have failed to dim either the brightness of his eyes, or the clearness of his intellect; the only sign of advanced longevity being the inability to undertake those long walks over the Chalk Hills around Shoreharu, in which he, till lately, delighted to indulge.

The summer visitor to Lyme-Regis, to Scarborough, or to Whitby, is familiar with the little Ammonites, mounted in silver as brooches for ladies, and may even have seen them also with heads carved, to represent coiled-up serpents, with gieen or pink eyes of glass, inserted by the enterprising jeweller.

A series of specimens showing successive stages in the development of a remarkable malformation of this species seems to me quite worth recording. The specimens are all from the Carboniferous Limestone of Settle.

The specimen which forms the subject of the present communication was obtained by one of the writers from the Carboniferous Limestone, near Dublin. Although one side of the specimen is covered by matrix, yet the other side and the periphery are so splendidly preserved, and the shell has not been distorted during fossilisation, that the characters of the fossil can be accurately determined (see Woodcut, p. 254).

When one refers back to such a paper as that by Babbage on the Temple of Serapis at Pozzuoli, one feels humiliated by the little advance which has been made in certain branches of dynamical geology within the last sixty years. That paper contains a full and elaborate account of the plan and history of the Temple and of the remarkable changes of level which its site has undergone gone; and the author speculates among other causes upon the expansion and contraction of the underlying rocks, owing to changes of temperature arising from its being situated in a volcanic district, and he is thence led to speculate on the larger question of the depression and elevation of regions of the earth's surface through the fall and rise of the isogeotherms, caused by denudation and deposition respectively.

Mr. Whiteaves in his description of this species mentions that “in one specimen there are indications of what looks like a short break or separation between the anterior and posterior portions of the dorsal (or between the two dorsals if there were two, which is scarcely probable), but this break may be owing to an accidental and abnormal fracture of the fin rays at this point, for in other specimens the two portions appear to be continuous.” This break is, however, represented in all his figures, including the restored sketch given in his second paper in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada.

The idea that the well-known shell-bearing sands of Moel Tryfaen indicate a submergence to the depth at which they are found, cannot perhaps be yet said to be, in the language of Mr. Dugald Bell, “a day-dream of the past,” though it is fast becoming so. Towards this result there must be two stages—disbelief in the submergence, and belief in something else. As to the first, Sir A. Ramsay wrote—“He must be a bold man who could see the shellbeds at Moel Tryfaen and deny that the sea had been there.”

The specimens which form the subject of this note were sent to me by Mr. G. F. Franks, F.G.S., of Bridgetown, Barbados, and were obtained by a correspondent of his from the island of Canouan, one of the Grenadine group. Mr. Franks had made slides from three of the samples, and having recognised them as foraminiferal limestones he sent them to me for fuller examination, stating at the same time that the limestone was associated with a compact igneous rock, apparently a porphyritic andesite, with abundant glassy ground mass enclosing streams of microliths. He also sent fragments of four differenct varieties of the limestone, and my friend Mr. W. Hill has been kind enough to cut me a slide frome one of these which appeared different from the others.

In the course of a recent prolonged residence in Tuscany and the Carrara Marble District, I had occasion to become well-acquainted with the Maremma hills and the islands composing the Tuscan Archipelago; and as I propose to revisit those islands at an early date with a view to more closely examine certain phenomena relating to the eruptive and metamorphic series more especially of Elba, it may not be out of place if, in the meantime, I give a rapid preliminary sketch of the leading geological and petrological features of that archipelago as a whole.

Many difficulties remain to be solved and much work to be done before we rest satisfied that we can understand how flint took the peculiar shapes and position in which we find it in the Cretaceous strata.

I quite agree with the submergence of the British Isles during the last or any Glacial period; but I totally disagree with the theory that there has been any such depression of the land as is generally put forward by geologists. Where is the evidence of such depression? Certainly not since Pliocene times, unless the whole of Great Britain sunk and rose simultaneously like the parallel motion of a beam engine. Such a motion would imply not only a surface movement, but also a sinking of all underlying strata.