Few men who have engaged successfully in commerce for nearly half a century have achieved so distinguished a position in the world of science as Sir John Evans. Indeed, it may be said that his keen intellect, which enabled him to excel in business affairs, also gave him enormous advantages in pursuing those branches of natural knowledge to the investigation of which he has devoted his long life and his remarkable abilities, ever combining “science with practice”. His powers of observation have always been singularly acute, and the writer recalls vividly a walk across the open country in Hertfordshire years ago, in his company, with Professor Boyd Dawkins and the late W. Ayshford Sanford and being struck with the rapidity with which John Evans's well-trained eye detected a flint implement on the stony surface of a stubble-field, overlooked by the rest of the party.

In the Summer of 1900 the present writer on a visit to Newquay casually observed a deposit containing land shells near the Lifeboat House by Towan Head. The description of the little section was included in a joint paper by Mr. A. S. Kennard and himself on the “Post-Pliocene Non-marine Mollusca of the South of England” and fortunately assigned in error to the Pleistocene period.

In Professor Gregory's interesting presidential address contained in your journal for October, there is a reference to the origin of the Sudbury ores, in which he expresses the opinion that they were deposited from solution long after the first consolidation of the rocks with which they are associated. As the Sudbury ore deposits are perhaps the best examples in the world of the magmatic segregation of sulphide ores it seems a pity that the weight of Professor Gregory's authority should be given against the correct view. Probably he has not read the reports on the region by Dr. Barlow and myself in which incontrovertible proof of the magmatic origin of these ores has recently been given. In the report prepared by myself it is shown that all the ore bodies are found at the lower edge of a laccolithic sheet of norite, blending upwards into micropegmatite, or on dike-like projections from this sheet. The laccolithic sheet is 37 miles long, 17 miles wide, and has dozens of ore bodies connected with its basic edge. The adjoining rock may be granite, gneiss, green schists, graywacke, etc., without affecting in any way the monotonous character of the ore. The ore bodies may contain fragments of the adjoining rocks and sometimes also of the norite, for some crushing and faulting has taken place; but everywhere the solid ore passes into pyrrhotitenorite, and then into norite spotted with blebs of ore. The sulphides have sharp boundaries against the adjoining rocks, but blend into the norite.

One of the most characteristic features of the great oceans is the presence of what have been aptly termed ‘deeps,’ enormous depressions in the ocean bottoms. Having in my “Evolution of Earth Structure” discussed their distribution and probable origin, I was naturally attracted by the notice in Nature of the surveys of the vessel “Edi” and the cable-ship “Stephan” during 1903 and 1905 in the western and south-western parts of the Pacific Ocean. Drs. G. Shott and P. Perlewitz, in a paper recently issued in the Archiv der deutschen Seewarte, taking into consideration previous work by U.S. ship “Hero” and of the German vessel “Planet,” consider that these soundings throw a great deal of new light on the configuration of the sea bottom in those regions. They state that the troughs forming the deeps are usually about 10 miles wide, excepeting the Guam deep, which is as much as 20 across. The most interesting statement to me is that in their opinion the troughs are the result of subsidence occurring on an enormous scale along lines of fracture, and that is probable the disturbances which produced these structures are comparatively recent.

More than sixty years have now elapsed since the publication of the classical monograph of MM. Milne-Edwards and Jules Haime, “Les Polypes Fossiles des Terrains Palæozoïques.” It can only be expected that many of the original descriptions of species in that work have for long been in need of amplification and revision. This applies with added force to the corals of the Carboniferous Limestone, in view of the impetus given to the palæontological study of that formation, by the vigorous revival of zonal work witnessed in the last few years. Those species in most urgent need of revision belong to the lower, or Tournaisian division of the Limestone, since their satisfactory determination affords a basis for evolutionary studies on the succeeding faunas, and an attempt is here made to deal with a few of these forms.

Taking into consideration the apparently hopeless tangle in which the ripplemark and submarine erosion questions had become involved, I submitted to the Devonshire Association in July last a paper entitled “The Ripplemark Controversy,” in which I attempted to bequeath the subject to posterity in such a form that anyone interested in the enquiry could pick it up where it had been dropped. It was, at any rate, my own farewell, or was so intended to be.