1869.] MEETING OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 307 



popular geological notions of the former condition of northern 

 geography. The great points received, he observed, were — the 

 mammoth being contemporaneous with man — " When did it 

 cease to Uve ? " and " Where did it appear for the last time ? " 

 They would never understand Kent's Hole completely until they 

 had solved these points. 



Professor i'oyd Dawkins in reply to a portion of Mr. 

 Howorth's remarks, said he had been misunderstood. He had 

 never said that the extinction of the mammoth in Siberia was 

 owing to its been hunted down, but he had stated that in 

 England and Western Europe generally there was no doubt that 

 the mammoth had become extinct by the hand of man. He also 

 shewed that the mammoth had lived when arctic animals 

 existed. 



Mr. Howorth, in reply, still differed from Professor Dawkins 

 as to the cause of the extinction of the mammoth. The race of 

 men existing at the time in the regions where the mammoth was 

 found was not able to cope with so gigantic a creature. With 

 regard to the second question put by Professor Phillips, he fixed 

 the north-east corner of Siberia as the spot where the last 

 mammoth lived. 



"ON THE TRAPPEAN CONGLOMERATES OP MIDDLETON HILL, 

 MONTGOMERYSHIRE," BY M. G. MAW. 



This was a description of the contemporaneous traps of Lower 

 Silurian age in the ridge known as Middleton Hill, running 

 parallel with the Breiddens, on the borders of Shropshire and 

 Montgomeryshire. Especial reference was made to the great 

 beds of bouldered trap, consisting of boulders of compact felstone 

 imbedded in a softer matrix of felspathic tuff. The nodules 

 occupy about half the mass of the conglomerate, and are unac- 

 companied by pebbles of any other rock. They vary from the 

 size of a walnut to rounded masses of more than a hundred weight. 

 Sir R. Murchison's description of these beds was referred to, and 

 the author took exception to the term "concretionary traps" 

 employed in the Silurian system, as he considered that the 

 rounded outline of the boulders was unquestionably due to me- 

 chanical causes. The interbedded traps, bounded on either side 

 by Lower Llandeilo Flags, are of a collective thickness of about 

 780 feet, including two beds of the bouldered felstone 115 to 

 140 feet thick, alternating with two beds of whitish-green felspa- 



