A brief notice of some of the more important Rhætic Fossils in the district described in this Magazine (vol. i. p. 257) may perhaps be some guide to the identification of the beds in other British localities.

The Upper Greensand is a marine formation. Dr.Fitton, in his elaborate Memoir on ‘The Strata below the Chalk‘ (Geol.Trans., Second Series, Vol. IV.), has enumerated 60 species of Mollusca, 2 Annelids, 3Echinoderms, and 2 Protozoons from the beds in the South of England belonging to this period. These numbers have been more than doubled since the publication of that paper. They still retain the same proportions; but the fossils which Dr. Fitton characterised as ‘ fish remains ’ have been referred to 9 genera, and there have been added 4 genera of Saurians. As might be expected, very few vegetable remains have been observed. Dr. Fitton records the occurrence of some impressions of leaves. The remains of what appear to be sea-weeds are occasionally met with. Specimens of fossil wood have also been found. William Cunnington, Esq. F.G.S., of Devizes, who has kindly, through the Editor, furnished me with some particulars regarding the Upper Greensand deposits near Shaftesbury, informs me that for forty years he has been collecting the fossils of these beds, and that during that time he has obtained about thirty specimens of woods, many of them certainly drift woods, as they had been attacked by lithophagous molluscs. I have examined all the specimens of these woods contained in the collections of the British Museum, and I find that they are all Coniferous. Little more than this can be said. The woody fibres contain a single row of discs, and I have not detected any spiral fibres associated with them.

About Midsummer of the year 1857, when a quarry was being made in the soft calcareous sandstone in the district of Gaudia, near the village of Micabba, Malta, one of the numerous fissures so common in all the formations of the two islands was observed to run in a straight line about E. and W. It was a simple vent, with several funnel-shaped expansions, and, as usual, was filled with red earth and stones. Among the débris of one of these expansions, several bones of large size attracted the attention of the workmen, and Dr. Speteri Agius, LL.D., a gentleman residing in the neighbourhood, having heard of the discovery, repaired to the spot, and picked up from among the exuvise a portion of a tooth and several fragments of bones, which he deposited in the Museum of the Maltese University. Shortly afterwards, a dispute between the proprietor and the lessee of the quarry put an end to the excavation, and the entire cavity was filled with rubbish, and levelled out into afield. In that condition it remained until reopened in June 1865.

The island of Tasmania is connected, as it were, with the continent of Australia by two chains of islands, the lines of which are afterwards continued in the mountain-syatems both of Tasmania and Australia. The Tasmanian systems pass from north to south in a strangely zigzag course, throughout which the mineralogical character of the rocks varies considerably. The land, therefore, may be presumed to have once presented a very different line of contour to what it does at the present day.

In the midst of a comparatively tame and highly cultivated plain of New Red Sandstone near the centre of England, there rises up a part of the under crust of the earth which presents so much the appearance of an island as to lead the imagination at once to those remote ages when its porphyritic Peaks and Syenitic Knolls were surrounded by the sea. The geological history of this celebrated spot has been skilfully unravelled by Professors Sedgwick and Jukes (Article in Potters's Charnwood Forest); the Rev. W. H. Coleman (Article in White'Directory); Mr. Edward Hull (Memoirs of Geol. Survey); and others.