One of the most beautiful examples of prismatic jointing that we know of in a sedimentary rock has lately come under my notice whilst travelling in N.E. Germany.

In Cardiganshire and the neighbouring counties of Central Wales there are abundant traces of the action of the great accumulations of ice and snow which covered all the mountains of Britain in the Glacial period. in the valleys lie thick sheets of Till and morainic formations, the hill sides are rounded and polished by the friction of the moving ice, and erratic blocks are strewn in abundance over hill and valley throughout the district.

It has often appeared to me that in working out the ancient physical features of the earth in former periods of its history, too little attention has been given to one simple set of evidences which are of wide-spread occurrence, and, frequently, of very clear and decided meaning. I refer to the included rock-fragments of conglomeratic deposits. An appeal to these fragments would, I believe, often bring out clearly-written facts of no small value for the elucidation of the nature of ancient sea-margins, as compared with the much-involved palæontological evidences with which we are made so much more familiar.

In England and Wales there is scarcely any area whose geological structure is so little known as the neighbourhood of Aberystwyth. Every year a stream of geologists passes through the northern parts of the Principality, through the varied old-volcanic districts of Snowdon and Cader Idris, and the rich collecting grounds of the Berwyns: and another such stream takes its course to the southern borders along the far west Pembrokeshire coasts, being guided by the careful work of Dr. Hicks. The border counties too are in many places attractive enough, for there it was that Murchison first saw the order of the Silurian rocks, and there also the best-preserved fossils are found. Llandeilo, Builth, Woolhope, May Hill, Malvern, and Wenlock have long yielded rich harvests to palæontologists.

In a traverse through part of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire last vacation, with the object of tracing the extent of the Cambridge Greensand, I was informed of some recently opened Coprolite works at Brickhill, near Bletchley. On further inquiry, they proved to be the “red coprolites,” a term applied by the workmen to the phosphatic nodules of the Neocomian like those of Potton and Upware (the Cambridge Greensand and Gault nodules being known as the “black coprolites”).

The country between Market Weighton and the Humber is characterized geologically by the reappearance of the Oolites along an outcrop of ten or a dozen miles, after having disappeared under the Cretaceous beds further north at Acklam Brow, near Malton.

Two years ago if a Palæontologist had been asked to mention a region in Britain most barren of fossils, he might well have ected that great area of Central Wales which is marked by a sombre grey in the maps of H.M. Geological Survey. And even now, after my laborious search in that country, it cannot be said to be anything better than very poor in organic remains.