John Macculloch, who was the first geologist to describe the Island of Rum, was so perplexed by the geological relations of the lavas of this island, that he wrote— “It is fruitless to accumulate conjectures, but it is not useless to confess ignorance, since it will point out to other travellers the blanks to be filled, and the errors to be corrected; while I may state in the words of St. Augustin my conviction that in this science also ‘Melius est dubitare de occultis quam litigare de incertis’. [It is better to doubt about mysteries than to dispute about uncertainties.]” (Macculloch, 1819, i, 497.) In spite of this self-imposed limitation Macculloch quite correctly compared the “stratified traps” of Rum with those of Skye and Canna, but otherwise he did little towards the description of these rocks.

In August, 1938, while participating in the expedition to Rum organized by the Botanical Department of King's College, Newcastle-on-Tyne, under the leadership of Professor J. W. Heslop Harrison, I was fortunate enough to discover a fragment of fossil wood enclosed in a trachybasalt lava. This is the first discovery of a fossil of any kind on this island and one of the few discoveries of fossil wood in the British Tertiary lavas.

The Kordofan Sand is a deposit of unconsolidated surface sands covering large areas to the west of the White Nile in the central part of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and especially in the province of Kordofan. In character, it is a typical winddeposited sand of well-rounded quartz grains, with a colour varying from pale buff to deep red. The colour is due to iron staining on the surface of the quartz grains, but only extends to a very shallow depth, sometimes as little as 4 to 5 feet, below which depth the sand is colourless. The absence of colour in the deeper parts of the deposit appears to be due to absence of iron rather than to its presence in a reduced state, and it is thought therefore that the iron must represent a concentration in the upper portion of the deposit. As far as investigation has been made there is no evidence of a downward leaching of iron-bearing solutions with penetration to underlying deposits.

The type specimen of Monograptus sedgwicki Portlock sp. has at last been found in the Collection of the Geological Survey in London, and Dr. Stubblefield has submitted it to me for examination. It bears the label “Prionotus sedgewicki” Portlock, and Graptolithus sedgewicki, and there can be no doubt of its identity. Portlock described the fossil as Graptolithus—PrionotusSedgewicki stating that it was named after Professor Sedgewick, though that is not the correct spelling of the name of that great geologist, which should be written without the second “e”.

The district to which this note refers lies on the northern front of the Sierra de la Demanda, near the eastern boundary of the province of Burgos (Spain). Here, a narrow strip of Carboniferous and Mesozoic formations, separating the Cambrian (or Silurian) of the Hercynian massif from the Tertiary of the foothills and Basin of Briviesca, has been violently disturbed in Tertiary times. The object of the note is to contribute data for the problem of the tectonics of this disturbed strip.

During a recent visit to Antigua, West Indies, Dr. C. T. Trechmann collected some fossils from the Middle Oligocene Antigua Formation, and a small but important series from the Seaforth Limestone at Seaforth. Both collections included corals. Dr. Trechmann has already published his results (1941); it is the object of the present paper to deal with the corals, and especially with those from the Seaforth Limestone, because of the conclusive evidence they afford of the age of that formation.

In December, 1936, I received from a Continental fellow-author of works on fossil Polyzoa, especially Cretaceous, a list of certain species described in Part III of “Further Notes on new or imperfectly known Chalk Polyzoa”, with a request that I would state the difference between them and the other species previously described which were linked with them in the list. I replied that I should always be prepared to answer such an inquiry on the understanding that the inquirer accepted as valid any answers which he could not dispute;

Recent examination of the well-known Shenley Hill Limestone lenticles and of the Regularis Nodules of Billington Crossing has resulted in the discovery of a number of new records. It will be remembered that Lamplugh and Walker in 1903 (1) and Lamplugh again in 1922 (2) placed the Shenley Hill Limestone at the top of the Lower Greensand both on stratigraphical and palaeontological grounds.

The two oldest rock systems of Tanganyika Territory have been named by the Geological Survey of that country the Upper and the Lower Divisions of the Basement Complex. The two divisions of the complex are distinguished by widely differing lithology. Their relative age has not been proved by superposition, but has been deduced by differences in the degree of metamorphism of the constituent rocks. The rocks of the Lower Division, which constitute the subject of this paper, have suffered folding, regional metamorphism, and widespread granitization.

While with the East African Archaeological Expedition in 1935, the writer had the opportunity of examining certain lacustrine deposits located by Dr. L. S. B. Leakey in the Mkujuni Valley of the Manyara basin.