At the Leeds Meeting of the British Association in 1890, my old friend Professor A. H. Green delivered an address to the Section which has generally been regarded as expressing an opinion adverse to the use of the science of geology as an educational agent. Some of the expressions used by him, if taken alone, certainly seem to bear out this interpretation. For instance, he says: “Geologists are in danger of becoming loose reasoners”; further he says: “I cannot shut my eyes to the fact that when geology is to be used as a means of education there are certain attendant risks that need to be carefully and watchfully guarded against.” Then he adds: “Inferences based on such incomplete and shaky foundations must necessarily be largely hypothetical.”

Such expressions, falling from an accomplished mathematician and one who was such an eminent field geologist as Professor Green, the author of some of the most trustworthy and most useful of the Geological Survey memoirs, and above all one of the clearest of our teachers and the writer of the best and most eminently practical textbook on physical geology in this or any other language, naturally exercised great influence on contemporary thought. And I should be as unwise as I am certainly rash in endeavouring to controvert them but for the fact that I think he only half believed his own words. He remarks that “to be forewarned is a proverbial safeguard, and those who are alive to a danger will cast about for a means of guarding against it.

The recently erected Memorial to the late Professor Henry Alleyne Nicholson, F.R.S., of Aberdeen, raised by subscription among his friends, deserves a record in the pages of this journal, to which he was for many years a frequent contributor (see Obituary of Nicholson, GEOL. MAG., 1899, pp. 138–144, with a portrait, Plate IV).

Professor Charles Lapworth, LL.D., F.R.S., of the University of Birmingham; Mr. John E. Marr, M.A., F.R.S., St. John's College, Cambridge; Dr. Henry Woodward, F.R.S., late of the British Museum (Nat. Hist.); and Professor J. Arthur Thomson, M. A., who succeeded Nicholson as Eegius Professor of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen, with very many others, decided to commemorate Nicholson's lifework by some simple yet permanent record; and after consultation with the University authorities it was decided that the memorial should take the form of a Tablet similar to that erected in Aberdeen to the memory of Macgillivray.

The preparation of a design was entrusted to Miss Alice B. Woodward, and the execution to the well-known artists in metal, Messrs. Omar Ramsden & Alwyn C. E. Carr, of Albert Studios, Albert Bridge Road, London, 8.W.

The Nicholson Memorial Tablet (which measures 3 feet 8 inches by 2 feet 11 inches) is executed in hand-beaten and repoussé brass, mounted upon a stout framing of oak, and is a good example of the effort now being made to improve the artistic quality of such work, and render it more worthy of its object than the ordinary hurried modern machine-produced metal-work.

In the “Geology of the Country around Ipswich, Hadleigh, and Felixstowe” Mr. Whitaker drew attention to the probable existence of Oldhaven Beds at Ipswich. On p. 11 he gives particulars of a section in Stoke brickyard. Below the London clay at this spot occurred fine buff sand separated from the Clay by a thin pebble-bed containing fragments of shells. The buff sand was doubtfully referred to the Oldhaven Beds, while it was thought that the pebble-bed should also be included with these rather than regarded as a basement-bed of the London Clay. Below this doubtful Oldhaven sand occurred sands and mottled clays of the Reading Series. It was shown in the memoir that this pebble-bed occurred over a great part of this district with an outcrop along the valleys of the Gipping and the Brett. As a rule it rests on sands referred to the Reading Series, and is classed by Mr. Whitaker sometimes as basement-bed of the London Clay and occasionally as Oldhaven Beds.

Recently in Ipswich I came across a very clear section of these beds in one of the brickfields, and as they here show a rather unusual facies it seems worth while to draw attention to the section, especially as the beds contain many fossils at one spot. The section occurs on the north side of Messrs. Bolton & Laughlin's brickfield between the Norwich and Henley Roads. The brickfield is situated almost due north of Brook's Hall, and about 100 yards south of the railway line, but apparently at the time of the Geological Survey there was no brickfield at this spot; the pebble-bed, however, was shown in another pit (which still exists) a little further westward, and was included in the basementbed of the London Clay by Mr. Whitaker.

During the early part of 1899 extensive excavations were made on the south side of Tooley Street, Bermondsey: just east of Shand Street, and on the site of Nos. 156–164, Tooley Street. The spot is about 250 yards from the present bank of the Thames. The whole area was excavated to a depth of about 10½ feet from the level of the pavement; below this, trenches and holes for the foundations were dug to a further depth of 6 to 8 feet. The section on the south side of the excavation is here given.

While appreciating and agreeing with the valuable work done by Dr. Irving and Professor Hull, dealing with the New Red rocks of South Devon, as set forth in their papers on this subject in the Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc., there is only one point in which I differ from these authors; it is in relation to the rocks forming the base of the Keuper in this area.

In the last of these papers both authors agree to regard certain breccias occurring at the mouth of the river Otter, and again at the mouth of the river Sid on its eastern side, as the basement beds of the Keuper.

The basement breccias of the river Sid section, as explained by them, are the Otterton breccias again brought up, and repeated by the fault which occurs at the Chit rock, where the sandstones on the east side of the fault are brought up against the Keuper marls on its west side.

The breccias near the mouth of the Otter have been described by Dr. Irving as calcareous or dolomitic breccias, or conglomerates, which I think quite a correct description of these beds. This description, however, certainly does not apply to the alleged breccias on the left bank of the Sid, to which I shall presently refer.

The Otterton breccias or conglomerates have been traced inland by Dr. Irving to various localities, all of which I have visited and have found correctly described. The breccias in the inland localities are, however, all along the strike of the Otterton Beds, and not in any case, along the strike of the alleged breccias said to occur in the Sidmouth section.