Only a few years ago it was looked upon as an article of faith among geologists, that the whole globe was once in a melted incandescent state, and that the conditions of temperature now prevailing on the surface of the earth have been in process of time produced by the slow gradual cooling of the once fused and glowing mass. It then appeared so natural that, in consequence of the earth’s internal heat, a tropical climate should extend from pole to pole, that no special weight was attached to the evidences of this fact which geology was at that time able to produce. The Dane Giesecke’s and the English Scoresby’s specimens of fossil plants from the east and west coasts of Greenland, evidencing a warm climate there, attracted so little attention, that neither they, nor the fossil remains of Saurians found by the famous Arctic traveller Sir Edward Belcher in the American Polar Archipelago, could be found in the museums to which they had been confided.

Note.–The Fossils about to be described were sent to England in 1873 and 1874 by Heer R. D. M. Verbeek, Director of the Geological Survey of Sumatra, and are here published by the authority and with the aid of the Dutch-Indian Government.

When a group of beds has well-defined boundaries above and below, and when moreover its palæontological characteristics coincide with its stratigraphical limits, it becomes a boon alike to the field-geologist and to the fossil collector. When, on the other hand, both limits and fossils fail to enable one to follow a group beyond a certain point, the sooner the series as such is relegated to the limbo of purely-local, convenient, but untrue divisions, the better. I propose to show in this paper that the important group of beds commonly known as the Yoredale Series in the North-Western parts of Yorkshire is a group of the latter kind, convenient indeed in that district, but quite incapable of being traced much further North either stratigraphically or palæontologically.

On my return to civilization, after an absence of nearly three years, I observe in the GeologicalMagazine for 1874, New Series, Decade II. Vol. I., pp. 404 and 433, a paper by Mr. R. J. L. Guppy, of Trinidad, describing new species of fossils from the West Indian Tertiaries, to which is appended a list of the fossils known to him up to that date. Unfortunately Mr. Guppy has overlooked my Memoir on the Geology af Santo Domingo, published in the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society more than a year before the date of his paper. In that paper I nearly doubled the list of known fossils in the West Indian Miocene, basing my determinations on a collection of unprecedented magnitude, made during the prosecution of the Geological Survey of the Dominican Republic.

The first South African diamond was found in March, 1867, and on examining its physical characters, it was pronounced by Dr. Atherstone to be genuine. When this stone was received in London, it created considerable interest, and also some degree of suspicion, some persons having asserted that it was brought forward for mercenary purposes; letters even appeared in the public papers implying that it was impossible it could have been found near Hope Town. As Dr. W. G. Atherstone, F.G.S., of Graham's Town (who in March, 1867, examined and pronounced the stone to be a diamond), is now in Bristol, I beg to offer a few general remarks on the Cape diamonds, and also to express in public my thanks to him.

In the short notice on the Drift (Geol.Mag. July, 1875, p. 328) I did not mean specially to condemn Mr. Birds; the paper being intended as a general protest against the loose nomenclature used by former writers and adopted by those of the present day.

This remarkable siderolite was found in Bohemia, at a spot not very far distant from the Saxon frontier or indeed from Rittersgrün, in Saxony, where a mass closely resembling it was almost contemporaneously found. So far back as 1751 at Steinbach, a village about midway between Breitenbach and Rittersgrün, a meteorite in all respects similar was discovered; the three masses are so similar to one another and so dissimilar to any others preserved in collections that there can be little doubt that they belong to the same fall. In 1825 Stromeyer examined a siderolite in which he found 61·8 per cent, of silica; this also appears to have been a member of this shower of meteorites, believed by Breithaupt to have been the “Eisenregen” which occurred at Whitsuntide, 1164, in Saxony, when a mass of iron fell near the town of Meissen.

Please correct the following in the Geological Magazine for September:—

Page 426, line 22, in two places, trachylyte for trachalite.

G. H. Kinahan.