The rarity of specimens of Sigillaria with foliage attached makes the specimen figured on Plate II. of great value. Since Lindley and Hutton figured a fragment of Sigillarian leaf, and from its nervation referred it to Cyperaceœ under the designation of Cyperites bicarinata (plate 43), not a little has been done to elucidate the foliage of this important genus.

In the last volume of the Geological Magazine the question concerning the origin of the Loess has been discussed by several authors in a minute and rather excited manner. Mr. Howorth has firstly expressed his opinion on that question in the Magazine for January and February, 1882, and he there combats the theory of the formation of the Loess as set forth by Baron Kichthofen (China, Bd. I., Berlin 1877). This distinguished geographer and geologist found himself compelled to explain and defend his theory in a detailed letter to the Editor of the Geological Magazine for July last, in which he enumerates and discusses the most important arguments of his theory.

Two masses of meteoric iron were discovered in Victoria in 1854, and they were first reported upon by the late W. Haidinger in the Sitzungsberichte A kad. Wiss. in 1861. The smaller block became the property of Mr. Abel, the engineer; the larger one was purchased by Mr. A. Bruce, now of Chislehurst. It appears that Mr. Bruce had seen a piece of iron, which had the appearance of being meteoric iron, in the fireplace of a squatter there, and he asked the man if any more of that kind was to be met with in that neighbourhood. He was conducted to a spot in the adjoining parish of Sherwood, where an irregular spur of iron projected from the surface, and he there and then purchased it with the intention of presenting it to the British Museum. Later on, when they proceeded to dig round it and uncover its sides, they were astonished at its large size. Various sums of money were offered Mr. Bruce for the splendid block, but his one answer to all such offers was, “No; I have bought it for a sovereign; and I am going to give it to the British Museum.” As has been stated, a point only of the iron was above the surface. A photograph was taken on the spot by my late friend, Mr. R. Daintree, the Agent-General for Queensland, after the tertiary sandstone inclosing it had been removed. It is the same sandstone which crops out at Broughton, with basalt from 12–15 feet below, as on the coast at Western Port. Bruce states that the lower bed is Silurian, and that the block of iron penetrated a foot or more into it.

We may pass next to the Sam Meylltern district, to examine the patch which Dr. Hicks on his sketch-map [Q.J.G.S. vol. xxxv. p. 297] has indicated as Dimetian with a strip of Arvonian along the north side. We read [l.c. p. 300], “Eastward (sic) of this, and as we approach the so-called altered Cambrian, rocks of a more felsitic character come in abruptly, and it is probable that these are of Arvonian age.” At the north end of the patch, by the Cromlech and Amwlch Lodge, the rock is however of the type which Dr. Hicks has termed Dimetian, and as it varies much in character at different parts of its course, I think we must ask for further proof that there is a second bed of rock of different age, in this area.

What is the burden of all these facts? Why, assuredly that the shells found in our higher marine drifts, or at least in nearly all of them, far from bespeaking conditions of climate such as can alone be fairly described as Glacial, on the contrary, speak to us of a time when the general temperature was perhaps somewhat lower than it is now, but when the North Sea and North Atlantic were filled with open water, and bathed a land where the Mammoth and the Rhinoceros could find abundant food, where the Oak and the Pine flourished, and where the rivers could sustain such molluscs as the Cyrena fluminalis. This conclusion destroys at once the basis of those who have argued that our high-level marine drifts were left where they are found by ice—either by floating bergs or a creeping ice-foot. But apart from the general conclusion which the particular collocation of shells enables us to make, quite a number of facts may be collected going to show the impossibility of ice having been the motive power which deposited such beds as those at Moel Tryfaen.