The presence of much native iron in Great Namaqualand was heard of in 1836 by the traveller Sir James E. Alexander, but he himself did not see any of the masses, and the material he acquired consisted only of small fragments that had been detached by the natives for pointing their weapons. An approximate chemical analysis of this material, made by Sir John Herschel, proved it to be meteoritic. A fragment weighing 2 grams which Alexander presented to the Geological Society of London in 1838 was transferred to the British Museum collection of meteorites in 1911. This appears to be all of his material that has been preserved.

Various other vague reports and travellers' tales have mentioned the presence of large masses of iron beyond the old mission station of Bethany, between there and Beersheba, and on the east side of the Great Fish River. A critical summary of these accounts was given by Sir Lazarus Fletcher in this magazine.

Nevil Story-Maskelyne described in 1870 the mineral constituents of the Bustee meteorite, which was observed to fall in 1852 near Bustee about 45 miles west of Goruckpur, India. The stone, weighing 1429 grams, now preserved in the British Museum collections, was found to consist chiefly of enstatite and diopside, and two constituents proved to be new minerals. Pale, chestnut-brown spherules of calcium sulphide, CaS, Story-Maskelyne named oldhamite and golden-yellow octahedra found embedded chiefly in the oldhamite he named osbornite. One side of the meteorite has been ground to reveal the nodules of oldhamite and a coloured lithograph in W. Flight's book ‘A chapter in the history of meteorites’ reproduces the appearance of the chief mineral constituents very well. The minute octahedra of osbornite are easily visible with a lens in the meteorite itself.

Haddenrig (Haddon Rig) quarry is situated three miles east of Kelso in Roxburghshire, near the road from Kelso to Mindrum in Northumberland. The rock quarried is marked on the Geological Survey Map (Scotland, Sheet 26) as a basalt intrusive into the Lower Carboniferous lavas (Kelso traps). The absence of exposed contacts excludes any direct field evidence of its intrusive character, but the appearance of the fresh basalt from the quarry suggests that it belongs to a sill or a plug, as it is in many ways similar to other intrusive basalts of the Kelso district. The evidence of the orientation of the felspar laths in the basalt is not entirely conclusive. With the exception of the northern part of the quarry where the orientation is vertical, elsewhere it is more or less horizontal. This suggests a sill. The vertical orientation of laths in the northern part of the quarry may be due either to the presence of a feeding channel or to eddies in the sill.

Hintze (1930) has pointed out the considerable variation in analyses of hydrozincite and the various formulae assigned to this mineral. Further data concerning this comparativeIy rare mineral are therefore desirable. Hydrozincite has been found at Narlarla, Western Australia, and this material is described below.

Narlarla is situated in the Napier Range, West Kimberley district (long. 124° 43′ E., lat. 17° 16′ S.), 75 miles due east from Derby, on the south side of the Barker River gorge (fig. 1). Several small silver-lead-zinc ore-deposits occur in the hills at Narlarla which are made up entirely of Devonian limestone. The occurrences have been described by Woodward (1907, p. 11), who, in his report, gives the results of assays of several specimens of the ore. These occurrences are Unique as they are the only known post pre-Cambrian primary ore-deposits in Western Australia. (Secondary gold deposits occur in the Donnybrook sandstone which is considered to be probably of Permian age (Forman, 1936).) The unique character of the Narlarla deposits has been noted by Simpson (1939, p. 218), who, however, offers no explanation as to their genesis. The absence of any post-Devonian igneous intrusives, other than the leucite-lamproite plugs (Wade and Prider, 1940) which are intrusive into the Permian rocks of the Fitzroy River area to the south of Narlarla, seems to indicate that these deposits are genetically related to the lamproite magma. The nearest known occurrence of the leucite-lamproites is at Mr. North, some 15 miles to the south (fig. 1), but there may be closer occurrences as the area has not been very closely examined, and the widespread distribution of the lamproite magma has been demonstrated (Wade and Prider, 1940).