William Boyd Dawkins, who has recently resigned the Professorship of Geology and Palæontology at the Manchester University, belongs to the comparatively rare, and now dwindling, group of naturalists who have extended their energies across the borderlands of their main subjects, and have become recognized as authorities also in neighbouring territories. If Boyd Dawkins had not been famous in the realm of Geology, he would still have been a prominent figure among anthropologists and archæologists; and if he had not established for himself a name among those whose researches have enriched the data and philosophy of science, he would still have been prominent as a teacher, an organizer, and a public-spirited citizen. Forty years ago, when there were two small collections of natural-history objects in Manchester, the late Professor Huxley nominated young Dawkins as the man with the requisite amount of energy, business capacity, and scientific knowledge to organize a central institution, which, now, under the control of the new University of Manchester, is an institution of importance as much to the student who requires reference materials as to the general public. Although the Manchester Museum has now attained dimensions requiring the superintendence by specialists in the three main branches of Natural History, the organization is the direct outcome of its first Curator, through whose influence mainly the money required for buildings has been obtained, and through whose attraction unique collections of materials have been secured.

During the Long Vacation of 1909, I was fortunate enough, when examining some gravel-pits in the company of Messrs. Rastall, Romanes, and Gandy, of Christ's College, to discover a Palæolithic implement, in situ, near Hildersham, Cambridgeshire.

Perplexing as are all problems connected with geological time, there has naturally appeared much more hope of determining the length of the period that has elapsed since the close of the great Glacial episode in the Northern Hemisphere, the period in which, indeed, we may be said to live, seeing that many processes that can be observed in action may be supposed to have gone on without interruption from the disappearance of the ice to the present day. It has proved, however, scarcely less difficult than the other problems of geological chronology. Many methods have been applied, and the results reached have been hardly less varied than the methods.

The existence of a ‘wind gap’ or ‘pass’ at the head of a dry dip valley clearly points to the former extension of that valley beyond the present escarpment; and the depth of the gap is a measure of the size of the valley before being beheaded by the recession of the escarpment. Thus the gap at Merstham is about 300 feet deep, and the valley would probably have continued south some miles on to the Wealden uplands; the floor of this valley falls regularly north, and presents all the features due to a stream flowing in that direction previous to the formation of the Gault strike valley. As an instance of a less developed beheaded valley, the Maplescombe valley, which joins the Darent valley on the right bank at Farningham, may be instanced. The Maplescombe valley has a ‘wind gap’ of possibly 100 feet deep, and so its former southward extension would not have continued into the Wealden area as far as the Merstham valley; moreover, the floor does not slope regularly to the Darent, but is steepest at the head, the distance between each contour-line increasing as one descends the valley, viz.—

The present valley floor, particularly the upper part, is evidently not the one down which a stream from the Weald would have flowed, for at the above noted rate of increased slope the valley would ‘run out’ (or become extinct) at a very few hundred yards south of the present Chalk escarpment, and this short length is not compatible with the excavation of a valley 100 feet deep, such as the present wind gap.

In the neighbourhood of Batcombe the Marlstone of the Middle Lias is typically developed, and is succeeded by thin alternating layers of clay and limestone, which are in turn followed by pale-Yellow fine-grained sands—near Bruton, of considerable thickness.

I have recently had the good fortune to come across the lost type-specimen of Phillips' Melania vittata in the course of going through the contents of one of the reserve cabinets in the Manchester Museum. The specimen was along with a number of others which formed part of the late Professor Williamson's collection, and my attention was drawn to it being the type by seeing a label attached bearing the following inscription: “This specimen is figured in Phillips' Geol. York., pl. 7, fig. 15.” A comparison with Phillips' figure confirmed this fact.

Mr. Geo. G. Holmes and others have observed the remarkable and highly suggestive fact that not only do the schists (which contain in many places interlaminated beds of quartzites and massive crystalline limestone, e.g. in the Dwarsberg on the Magalakwin River in the Northern Transvaal) appear interbedded in the gneisses, but that the strike foliation and planes of schistosity of these old schists and of the gneisses seem invariably to be parallel.

During the summer of 1908 I examined in the field the contact metamorphosed limestones of the county Donegal, my attention being mainly confined to those masses of limestone occurring as xenoliths in the granite. These strongly metamorphosed limestones frequently contain the interesting rock named by Dr. B. H. Scott ‘Sphene-rock’, which (“Granitic Rocks of Donegal”: Journal of the Geological Society of Dublin, 1861, vol. ix, p. 288) he describes as “occurring in actual contact with garnet limestones wherever we find these rocks”. This Sphene-rock consists of allotriomorphic and hypidiomorphic felspars, with quartz, idiomorphic diopside and sphene, and in some localities zoisite, scapolite, etc.

On the north side of the outcrop of the Chalk in the Isle o Purbeck, there is an outlier of Tertiary beds the exact age of which has given rise to some discussion. There must be some reason for the form of Creechbarrow Hill, and the outline suggests that it is due to some hard bed near the top, which we find on close examination to be a tough limestone, a considerable portion of which is hard and porcellaneous. The upper beds of this conical hill, which rises to a height of 637 feet above sea-level, are cut off from the adjoining masses, and therefore no continuous section can be traced to the well-known formations on the south or on the north. The section is further complicated by the occurrence of faults on both the north and south sides. We have, therefore, only the lithological character and fossil contents to depend upon for the correlation of the beds occurring in this outlier.