I have just received from Mr. C. H. Hartmann, of the “Range Nurseries, Toowoomba, Queensland,” a neighbour of my friend Mr. G. F. Bennett, to whom I am indebted for fossil remains from that locality (Megalania, e.g.), an outline of the entire skull of a Thylacoleo. It is a basal view of the skull in which the teeth of the upper jaw are indicated in situ, determinativeof the genus and apparently species. The writer states, “I have only just drawn a pencil outline round the skull soas to give you the right dimensions1—the most remarkable appearance is that there is scarcely any brain, bu very strong and thick bones.”

In the March and April Numbers of the Geological Magazine, Mr. J. J. Harris Teall describes some beautiful rocks from the Cheviots, containing a rhombic pyroxene with well-marked pleochroism, and as there seems little doubt that this mineral, which we must consider hypersthene, has been hitherto overlooked in a good many rocks, another note of its occurrence may perhaps possess some interest.

In concluding an article on “The Climate Controversy” in the Geol. Mag. for September and October, 1876, I observed (p.451) that it had long appeared to me that the “Glacial period proper” was due neither to a change in the earth’s axis, nor to any variation in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit, nor to any changes in the distribution of land and water, but to a diminution in the heat-emitting power of the sun. In a memoir on the Newer Pliocene period in England, published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society for Nov. 1880, and Nov. 1882, wherein I have endeavoured to trace in detail the succession of events in this country from the commencement of the Red Crag down to the close of the Minor Glaciation, I have reiterated that view, as being the only one that is reconcileable with the succession thus traced; for with the exception of the single interval of warmer climate in which the beds termed by me the “Cyrena fluminalis formation” accumulated, and which was succeeded bythe renewed refrigeration that I have termed the “Minor Glaciation,” and regarded as coincident with the second advance of the Alpine glaciers long ago detected by Continental geologists, I have not been able to discover any indication of those alternations of warm and cold climate, which form an indispensable part of the eccentricity theories of Adhemar, Croll, Murphy and others.

No fact in Physical Geology is more frequently recorded than a simultaneous occurrence of subsidence of the earth’s crust where deposition of sedimentary strata has been in progress. Reference is often made to the fact that the basement beds of different sedimentary formations were deposited in shallow water, and to the indications presented by subsequent deposits that they were accumulated in a sea of moderate depth. On them immense accumulations may have been deposited in successive strata, amounting even to miles in thickness; showing that with the deposition there has been a corresponding depression of the original surface. Though these phenomena are so inseparable in their occurrence and so well known, English geologists, until the last few months, have made little, it may even be said no endeavour, to determine whether they should be associated as cause and effect. This has not been the case with American geologists.

In recent discussions upon the classification of the Archæan, great importance has naturally been attached to the occurrence of beds of fragmental origin. In the distinctly volcanic beds these are numerous; in the older or more highly metamorphosed portion of the group they are less frequent and their character and origin are more obscure.

Some views in theoretical geology are held so vaguely that when one attempts to grasp them it is like clutching at shadows. To any one who will put his ideas into figures our thanks are therefore due.