Of the varied Echinoid fauna from the well-known ‘Sponge-gravels’ of Faringdon, Berkshire, there are no constituent forms of which the remains are more abundant than those of Cidaris. It is no exaggeration to say that every handful of the ‘gravel’ will include many fragments of radioles, and some portions of test, which can he ascribed to that comprehensive genus.

Mr. Bullen Newton has recently determined the fossils found by my students and myself in the Alexandria Beds near Port Elizabeth to be of Mio-Pliocene age; the full memoir will shortly be published in the Records of the Albany Museum, Grahamstown. Hitherto the Alexandria Beds have been regarded as Danian on the strength of the evidence afforded by the Polyzoa and casts of Lamellibranchs, but the well-preserved shells on which Mr. Newton founds his determination of the age of the beds leave no doubt but that this earlier one is wrong. If the beds had been Danian there should be some connexion between these and the Pondoland Cretaceous in regard to the conditions of their deposition, which there is not. In trying to clear the way for a better conception I endeavoured to show that as the affinities of the Pondoland fossils lay with Cenomanian forms from Tunis, the age of the Pondoland Beds was towards the lower half of the Upper Cretaceous; then the supposed Cretaceous beds of Alexandria with. Tertiary sharks’ teeth would represent transition beds between the Cretaceous and Eocene. Dr. Kitchin, however, objected to this, as the Pondoland fauna taken as a whole was Turonian, if not Senonian, and the gap between the Pondoland and the Alexandria Beds became so small that there was not time for the undoubted changes in the land to have taken place which would have allowed the deposition of these several formations in the positions we now find them.

Palæontology is the biology of fossils. The palæontologist, therefore, is bound to consider modern biological views in order that he may test them in the light of his science. It is intended here to apply to one class of fossils the fundamental principles upheld in a remarkable work by the late H. M. Bernard, entitled Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, really two books under one cover, the first dealing with the ultimate structure of protoplasm and the second with a method of organic evolution. The principles underlying the first suggest the methods of the second; so that in approaching the second a thorough knowledge of the first is needful. Before applying it let us examine the theory itself.

Assuming that the Lizard Peninsula is a pre-Cambrian complex (Fiett), and that the Hornblende Schists of Pollurian have nothing to do with the northern sediments, it will be well to call attention at first to the extensive folding of the rocks at Pollurian, which, gradually loses itself as we pass northward in a series of lengthening S.E.–N.W. folds, finally dying away at Porthleven into more or less horizontal beds as we approach Trewavas. Minor contortion is ignored.