ON THE STRUCTURE OF A CORAL REEF. 557 



the surface, prevailed on the authorities of the Department of Mines, 

 Sydney, to lend plant and workmen in order to continue the old bore-hole 

 and, if possible, to put down another one in a shallow part of the lagoon. 

 Application was made to the Admiralty by the Royal Society, and 

 permission was given for the members of the expedition and the plant to 

 be conveyed from Suva to Funa Futi and back by H.M.S. ' Porpoise.' The 

 expedition has been at work during the summer, and intelligence of the 

 result will doubtless reach England during the present autumn. Until 

 this arrives, and the study of the materials already in this country has 

 been completed, it would be premature to express any opinion of the 

 theoretical bearing of the results obtained by the very successful operation 

 undertaken in 1897. 



The sum of 40^. granted at Toronto by the General Committee at 

 Toronto has been drawn by the Chairman and remitted to Professor 

 Edgeworth David in aid of the expenses of the expedition of 1897 (which 

 have been heavier than was anticipated). 



The Ewj/ptendr-hearing Roclis of the Pentland Hills. — Final ll&port of 

 the Committee, consisting of Dr. R. H. Traquair (Chairman), Mr. 

 M. Laurie {Secretary), and Professor T. Rupert Jones. 



The work of your Committee on this fossiliferous bed is now completed. 

 As mentioned in a former report the method adopted was to remove a 

 considerable section of the bed which is comparatively thin, and trans- 

 port it to a more accessible place where the rock was carefully split. This 

 mode of procedure had the advantage of enabling us to deal with a much 

 greater amount of material than could have been gone over at the locality 

 itself. On the other hand, the highly jointed nature of the rock rendered 

 it difficult to transport it in large pieces, and many of the specimens are 

 consequently fragmentary. Nevertheless, a few very fine specimens have 

 been procured, notably an almost complete Drepanopterus pentlandicus, 

 and a large amount of fresh information has been gained as to the struc- 

 ture of other forms. The presence and structure of the preoral cheliurse 

 in Stylonurus have been a,scertained, as well as nearly all the details of the 

 other appendages of this form. Some hitherto undescribed forms, includ- 

 ing a new genus, Bemlycosoma, of somewhat doubtful position among the 

 Eurypteridse, have also come to light. The type specimens of these new 

 forms ai'e, however, not in this collection, as they were all represented by 

 better specimens in a private collection which recently became available 

 for examination, having been acquired by the Edinburgh Museum of 

 Science and Art. These, as well as the more instructive specimens from 

 the collection formed by your Committee, have been described and figured 

 this year in the ' Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.' 



One of the points which your Committee had to decide was the strati- 

 graphical position of the bed. They came to the conclusion, from the 

 fossils present in it and the neighbouring beds that it must be considered 

 as being on the Wenlock horizon. It is unnecessary to deal with the 

 evidence which led to this conclusion, as the Scottish Geological Survey 

 have this year been revising the district, and in their new monograph on 

 it come to the same conclusion. This bed is, therefore, at a distinctly 

 lower horizon than most of the other deposits which have yielded Euryp- 

 terids. This agrees with the fact that some of the forms, such as the 



