The ‘Soapstone bed,’ which has yielded the specimens about to be described by Dr. Henry Woodward, was so named by the late George Wild. It is a thin band of light-grey shale lying from 4 to 7 feet above the ‘Mountain Four Feet’ mine in the neighbourhood of Colne and Trawden.

The shale contains an abundance of small flattened nodules, varying in size from half an inch to six inches in length, and from half an inch to two and a half inches in breadth. The vertical thickness rarely exceeds an inch and a half. The shale readily breaks down into a soft unctuous clay on weathering, whilst the outer surface of the nodules undergoes oxidation and breaks away in thin coats. The nodules consist of earthy carbonate of iron, and it is to the oxidation of the latter that breaking up takes place by a process of concentric scaling.

Between the ‘Soapstone bed’ and the ‘Mountain Four Feet’ mine are black shales with dark ironstone nodules often full of Gonialites, Fterinopecten, etc. The horizon from the top of the coal-seam to the ‘Soapstone bed’ is the most prolific in organic remains in the Lower Coal-measures, in whatever locality it may be met with.

Whilst the horizon of the Soapstone nodule bed is constant over a large area, the beds immediately subjacent to it are not. The Mountain Four Feet mine, upon which it rests under and around the whole of the Burnley coalfield, is seen when traced southwards to be formed by the union of two coal-seams, the ‘Gannister mine’ and the ‘Bullion mine’ respectively.

By the courtesy of my friend Mr. Herbert Bolton, the Curator and Secretary of the Bristol Museum, several specimens have been placed in my hands for examination. They were collected by Mr. Peter Whalley from the ‘Soapstone bed,’ a little distance above the ‘Bullion Mine’ (or ‘Mountain Four Feet’) on the hill near Colne, Lancashire, and he permits me to figure and describe them.

All the specimens are enclosed in small, elliptical nodules of clayironstone, evidently formed around the organisms by a process of concretionary action at the time of their embedment in the sediment forming the layer in which the nodules occur, the fossils being, as usual in such cases, exposed by splitting the concretions open along their periphery

The following species of Brachiopoda were recorded by Messrs. Marr & Roberts from the Ordovician beds of the Haverfordwest district:—

Proceeding westward, the fauna again increases in richness. The molluscan fauna of the Gulf of Kiel has been elaborately described by Meyer and Möbius in their well-known work entitled “Fauna der Kieler Bucht.” They thus enumerate the shells found there:—

In a former publication I have dealt with the anatomy of Prolagus sardus (Wagn.), from the Sardinian and Corsican Pleistocene, in comparison with that of its Tertiary relatives. The following pages deal with the geographical distribution of Pleistocene Prolagus and its bearing on more general questions.

When Ouvier discovered, in the ossiferous breccia of Corsica, remains of a ‘Lagomys,’ which he believed to be closely related to the Siberian Lagomys alpinus, he also suggested other analogies between the faunas of the two regions—Siberia and Corsica (as well as Sardinia), and commented upon the supposed relationship between the insular Mouflon and the Siberian Argali. Similar views were expressed by B. Wagner.

Pumpelly, Loeard, and Lortet sought to establish a connection between a supposed Corsioan ‘ice-age,’ as attested by the trace of ancient glaciers, and the former existence in the island of a supposed inhabitant of cold regions, the Lagomys corsicanus. Hensel had, however, shown before, in 1856, that the affinities of Lagomys sardus from the Sardinian bone breccia are not with the recent Lagomys (Ogotona), but with a Miocene type, for which he proposed the generic name Myolagus (antedated by Prolagus, Pormel). He was in consequence inclined to assume a Tertiary age for the breccias in which the Prolagus occurred (and, indeed, for the whole of the Mediterranean bone breccias). A similar view has again been brought forward of late years.

I myself pointed out (1) that the Corsican Lagomys likewise belonged to the genus Prolagus, as indeed had already been suspected by Hensel from his inspection of Cuvier's figures; (2) that the Tertiary age of the Corsican and Sardinian breccias could not be upheld, above all, because the mollusca occurring in them, as Loeard bad shown to be the case in the ossiferous breccia of Toga, near Bastia, are still living in the neighbourhood.