578 



NATURE 



[Oct. 



ii, 



i88- 



stone, represented by Ctenacanthus, Ortkacanthus, and others, 

 are absent, the only species hitherto found being those of the 

 curious Cladacanthns and Physonemus, 



On the Occurrence of ike Remains of Labyrintkodonts in the 

 Yoredale Rocks of Wensleydale, by James W. Davis, F.S.A., 

 F.G.S. — Some bones of the leg of a Labyrinthodont were dis- 

 covered by Mr. Home and described by Prof. L. C. Miall in 

 the Quarterly fournal of the Geological Society, vol. xxx. p. 775. 

 They were found in a dark-coloured flagrock above the Harmby 

 Quarry, which also extends with an easterly dip to the Harmby 

 railway cutting. The same flagrock is also found behind Ley- 

 burn and the Shawl, and ia that locality it has been extensively 

 quarried. In addition to the leg-bones already mentioned, 

 others have been found in the same flagrock, but separated by 

 considerable distance-, so that it is not probable that they be- 

 longed to the same Labyrinthodont. In the railway cutting a 

 portion of a cranium was found. It is 1*9 inch in length and 

 I 4 in breadth. A number of sutures, not very well defined, 

 seem to indicate that the bone constituted the back part of the 

 skull. The third specimen was found in the quarries beyond 

 the Shawl north-west of Leyburn, and exhibits casts of the 

 jaws of another Labyrinthodont. Each ramus is about three- 

 inches in length ; they have been disturbed and displaced. The 

 external surface of the jaws was ornamented with a reticulated 

 arrangement of tubercles, an impression of which is preserved 

 in the specimen. Along the margin of the impression of the 

 alveolar portion of one of the rami there is a series of impres- 

 sions w r hich appear to have been caused by small pointed 

 teeth. 



Section across the Trias recently exposed by a Railway Ex- 

 cavation in Liverpool, by G. H. Morton, F.G.S. — During the 

 la>t eight years a very important section of the Triassic strata 

 has been exposed in Liverpool, by excavations for widening the 

 line of the London and North-Western Railway Company. The 

 section presents a solid mass of sandstone on both sides of the 

 new railway cutting from Lime Street Station to Edge Hill Sta- 

 tion, a distance of 2300 yards from east to west. The height 

 of the rock on each side varies. The strata exposed belong to 

 the Keuper and Bunter formations. The Pebble Beds of the 

 Bunlcr crop out for 914 yards along the east of the cutting, but 

 do not contain any marl partings, and not a single pebble of any 

 kind has been noticed. Only two faults occur along the whole 

 length of the Pebble Beds exposed, and they are of very little 

 importance. The subdivision ends at Smithdown Lane, where 

 there is a fault with a downthrow to the west, which brings in 

 the upper mottled sandstone, the highest member of the Banter 

 formation, where it is not represented on the map of the Geo- 

 logical Survey, or the fault recorded. The Upper Mottled is a 

 fine-grained, soft, bright red sandstone with grey streaks, and as 

 it readily crumbles into sand is never hard enough for building 

 purposes, it crops out to the west from Smithdown Lane to 

 University College, when a fault throws down the strata about 

 600 feet and brings in the Keuper sandstone, which is 400 feet 

 thick, and inters'.ratified with thin beds of marl. The highest 

 beds of the Keuper are at the College ; lower strata containing 

 the beds of marl crop out from beneath, and are thrown down 

 to the west by faults three times in succession, when the base- 

 ment beds crop up in Lime Street Station. The section shows 

 that all the faults throw down the strata to the west and bring in 

 higher beds in that direction. It also show's the exact position 

 of the fault between the Bunter and Keuper formations, which 

 was not known before. The position of the Keuper, as a 

 wedge-shaped mass of sandstone, with the Bunter formation 

 faulted against it on the east and west, is of great local interest, 

 and it is easy to understand how the succession of the strata has 

 not been satisfactorily explained before in the absence of any 

 such a continuous section as that described. The remarkable 

 absence of faults in the pebble-beds has an important bearing 

 on the construction of the Mersey Tunnel, which will have to 

 be carried through these beds along its entire length. The 

 section shows that while faults are numerous in the Keuper sand- 

 stone, which was frequently fractured during subsidence into a 

 depression, the pebble-beds are very little faulted. A few days 

 ago, when under the Mersey, I did not find a single fault either 

 in the tunnel or in the heading beneath. 



Recent Opinions on the Loess Deposits of the Valley of the 

 Rhine as Evidence of a " Great Post-Glacial Flood," by Mark 

 Stirrup, F.G.S., adversely criticises recent opinions of Mr. H. 

 H. Howorth, F.S.A., as to the mammoth in several of the 

 superficial deposits proving a "great Post-Glacial flood." The 

 facts connected with the loess deposits of the Rhine Val- 



ley are not consistent with the interpretation given to them I y 

 Mr. Howorth, nor is the assumption that the materials of the 

 loess were derived from volcanic mud-streams borne out by the 

 evidence. The author considers Mr. Howorth has fa'led to 

 prove his po-tulate that not only the extinction of the mammoth 

 but the existence of several superficial or Post-Glacial de- 

 posits were due "to a sudden catastrophe involving a great 

 diluvial movement which extended over the larger part of the 

 northern hemisphere, and accompanied by an equally sudden 

 and violent change of climate," and the author considers th; 

 whole of the evidence adduced by Mr. Howorth as unsound and 

 inconclusive. He regards Mr. Howorth's attempt to resusci- 

 tate some of the obsolete doctrines of Cuvier and Buckland as 

 a retrograde movement in the history of geology. 



Master Divisions of the Tertiary Period, by Prof. Boyd 

 Dawkins.— The classification of the Tertiary locks sketched 

 out some fifty years ago and since then alte r ed in no important 

 degree is out of harmony with our present knowledge, and the 

 definitions of the series of events which took place in it has 

 been greatly modified by the process of discovery in various 

 parts of the world. The terms Eocene, Miocene, and Plio- 

 cene no longer express the idea of percentages of living species 

 of fossil mollusca upon which they were founded, and Post- 

 Tertiary, Quaternary, and Recent are founded on the assumed 

 existence of a great break comparable to that separating the 

 Secondary from the Primary or Tertiary periods which is now 

 known not to exist. The author proposed a classification of 

 the Tertiary period in Europe, by an appeal to the land mam- 

 malia, and since that time his definition has been found to 

 apply equally well to the Tertiaries of Asia and the Americas 

 and to the late Tertiaries of Australia. He stale 1 that the 

 forms of life in the rocks have changed at a very variable rate, 

 and in direct proportion to their complexity of organisation, 

 the lower and simpler having an enormous range, while the 

 higher and more complex have a much narrower range and 

 are more easily affected by the change in their environment. 



On a Boulder from the Chlorilic Marl of Ashwell, Herts, by 

 H. G. Fordham. — Boulders found in these marls, in the so- 

 called coprolite workings in Cambridgeshire and the neigh- 

 bouring counties, are usually little more than pebbles. The b aulder 

 now described measures 12 X 9i X 5I inches. It is somewhat 

 triangular in general form, and is much rounded and worn. The 

 material, according to Prof. Bonney, is a quartz-felsite. The 

 author attributes its origin to its being brought to its present 

 position by floating ice. 



Preliminary Note on lie Fur, her Discovery of Vertebrate Foot- 

 prints in the Penrith Sandstone, by G. V. Smith. — The speci- 

 mens were obtained from a quarry opened out by the Settle and 

 Carlisle Railway, situated on the slope of the hill, north of the 

 highway from Penrith t 1 Alston, and about three and a half 

 miles from Penrith, the sandstone is strongly current bedded, 

 and is largely used for building purposes ; these sandstones are 

 older than the magne^ian limestone. The impressions indicate 

 several distinct forms of vertebrates. 



On a Supposed Case of Mciamorphism in an Alpine Rock of 

 Carboniferous Age, by Prof. T. G. Bonney, M.A., F.R.S.— At 

 the base of the Carboniferous series in some parts of the Western 

 Alps is a conglomerate called the PouMngue de Vol Orsine, the 

 matrix of which abounds in mica, and is supposed by some geo- 

 logists to exhibit true foliation. In the Alps there is always an 

 transition from the comparatively unmetamorphosed rocks 

 of known geological age to the true schists and gneisses of un- 

 known but certainly far greater antiquity, and nothing short 

 of the clearest proof would justify us in considering any of these 

 crystallised foliated rocks as altered Devonian or Silurian, even 

 though the latter term be used in its most extended sense. 



Oh the Geological Age of the Nortk Atlantic Ocean, by Prof. 

 Edward Hull, LL.D., F.R.S., &c, Director of the Geological 

 Survey of Ireland. — In this paper the author made use of three 

 leading formations as factors in his inquiry, viz. the Archsean 

 (or Laurentian), the Silurian (chiefly the Lower Silurian), and 

 the Carboniferous. He considers that throughout the Archsean, 

 or Laurentian, the Lower Silurian, and the Carboniferous 

 epochs, the regions of North America, on the one hand, and of 

 the British Isles and Western Europe were submerged, while a 

 large part of the North Atlantic area existed as dry land, from 

 the waste of which these great formations had been buil' up ; 

 and he urged that if such were the case, the doctrine of the 

 permanency of oceans and continents, as tested by the case of 

 the North Atlantic, falls to the ground. 



Dyas versus Permian, by Rev. A. Irving, B.Sc, P.A., 



