The rich invertebrate fauna of the Uitenhage Series has long attracted attention, owing to the conspicuous nature of some of its components and the divergence of opinion which has arisen in the various attempts to bring it into correlation with Secondary faunas in the European area. A recent examination of the fossils collected from the Uitenhage Beds by the Geological Survey of Cape Colony has afforded an opportunity of reconsidering, in the light of extended knowledge, the conclusions of those who have previously studied this question of correlation. A comparative study of the fauna, with an account of some new species, based principally upon the materials collected by the members of the Survey, will shortly be contributed to the fourth volume of the “Annals of the South African Museum”; but in the meantime, the following brief notes, in which are embodied some of the principal results, may be of interest to a wider circle of readers.

Considering now the details of the various districts, we notice that in South Öland the basal beds are shaly and conglomeratic; the higher part is calcareous, and by increase in the proportion of matrix passes into a creamy-white limestone which is wonderfully fossiliferous (0 1 and C). The highest beds are again glauconitic, soft, and shaly. Northward the proportion of calcareous material diminishes, and a band of shale with Shumardia, whose lithology and fossil content agree with that of the Ottenby Ceratopyge shales below the unconformity, is interstratified with the limestone. This bed is quite inconstant, but in Central Öland another shale band containing Euloma occurs low down in the limestone. Beyond Borgholm (05 and 06) all limestone disappears, and only glauconitic shale separates the alternating of Dictyonema shale and Obolus conglomerate from the Orthoceras limestone above. In Central Öland the glauconite shales and Ceratopygekalk attain their maximum thickness of nearly seven feet, but in the north are again reduced to little more than one foot.

Mr. Clement Reid's explanation of the broken and contorted condition of the Chalk seems to me quite incomprehensible. Let us analyze the position rather more closely. The champions of ice as the cause of the phenomenon we are discussing appeal to it in two forms—ice-sheets and icebergs. Mr. Eeid was, I believe, the originator of the notion that the dislocations of the Norfolk Chalk were due to an ice-sheet, which means an ice-sheet occupying the North Sea.

Some interesting Ophiurids from the Melbournian rocks of Victoria are described by Mr. F. Chapman in Part viii of his valuable series of articles on “New or little-known Victorian fossils in the National Museum” [Melbourne] (Proc. Roy. Soc. Victoria, n. ser., vol. xix, p. 21; Feb., 1907).

The commonest species of the genus Metriorhynchus occurring in the Oxford Clay of the Peterborough district is Metriorhynchus superciliosus (Desl.). The species found in the above locality has been identified with that of Deslongehamps by the late Mr. J. W. Hulke, F.R.S., in his paper “On the Skeletal Anatomy of the Mesosuchia” (Proc. Zool. Soc. London, November 20th, 1888), and also by Mr. Lydekker in the “Catalogue of Fossil Reptilia and Amphibia,” part iv, Suppt., p. 232. Mr. Lydekker, at the time he compiled the Catalogue, brought a east of part of the skull of M. supercilicsus to compare with the numerous skulls in the Eyobury Collection.