456 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Dec. 



which new worlds are forming. Meteorites and nieteoritic 

 masses, then, constitute two classes of bodies which have to be con- 

 sidered in meteoric astronomy. It is, however, reasonable to pre- 

 sume that the same forces which, in the phase of greatest concen- 

 tration of the solar system, give rise to nieteoritic masses might, in 

 a phase of vastly greater antiquity and of greater extension of the 

 solar orb, have given rise in a similar manner to rings of 

 meteoroids. Continued observations directed to the phenomena 

 of shooting stars will certainly remove doubt from this province 

 of astronomy, and probably throw light on some of the most 

 difficult questions in cosmical philosophy, such, for example, 

 as the existence of organic matter (a kind of peat or humus) in 

 tbe meteorites of Ors-ueil. 



RESEARCHES IN THE LINGULA FLAGS IN SOUTH WALES. 



BY MR. H. HICKS AND J. W. SALTER, F.G.S. 



Mr. Henry Hicks, a resident of St. David's, having been en- 

 trusted with a grant to aid him in searching out the fossils of 

 these strata, the results have been so important, as to lead to the 

 discovery of an entirely new British formation, and the authors 

 propose a new term for the group. The Cathedral City of St. 

 David's was anciently called ' Minevia,' and hence, following the ex- 

 ample of the best geologists, viz., first to ascertain the position, then 

 the fossil contents of a group, and then to name it, the authors pro- 

 pose the term ' Minevian,' for the lowest division of the Lin- 

 gula flag. Mr. Hicks described five sections on the coast north 

 and South of St, David's — the coast affording admirable views of 

 all the beds, from the central syenite through the olive gray, green 

 and purple beds of the Lower Cambrians, in to the light-gray, black 

 and grey shales of the Minevian group. Some of the sections show 

 a passage from this group into the Ffestiniog group of Professor Sedg- 

 wick which forms the main mass of the Lingula flags proper, and 

 in Whitesand Bay these are again overlaid bythe Skiddaw group and 

 the Llandeilo flags. Each of the sections has shown fossil traces 

 after a long and persevering search. But the section at Porth 

 Raw is not only the typical one, but contains all the principal 

 fossil types — trilobites of six or seven genera, and about 15 species : 

 brachiopod and pteropod shells, cystideae, sponges of two or three 

 different kinds. All of them are distinct not only as to species, 

 but usually as to genera also from the overlying rocks of the 



