3206 JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 
shell-rock by the roadside, which did not look like a shell. He 
dismounted, and as the rock was soft, he managed to extract the 
object without injury, when it proved to be the egg of some 
ancient sea-bird. It is 2 inches long, by rather less than 1% 
inch in its greatest diameter, and is very pointed at the small 
end. The colour is a bluish grey, lightest at the small end, but 
stained of a yellowish brown towards the larger one; but it Is, 
of course, impossible to say what the original colour may have 
been. The egg was evidently dropped by some sea-bird while 
swimming, just as ducks often drop them now, and in water too 
deep for the swell to affect it. Here it got covered up by shells, 
and afterwards by sea bottom to a depth of fully 150 feet,—the 
seam of rock in which it was found being in the Otatoka 
Valley, wnich is eroded to more than that depth. Since then 
the land has risen, the valley been washed out, and the bed of 
shells cemented through partial decomposition into a soft stone, 
though hard enough to be used as road-metal and for harbour 
works. There are a number of seams of shell-rock in that part 
of the country, and this is not the first time that curious things 
have been found in them. A human skeleton of a small person, 
with excessively slender bones, was found some years ago, in the 
sandy layer between two seams, by some road-men making a 
side cutting in the Okahu Valley, at a depth of fully 200 feet 
below the level of the adjacent country; and I have in my 
possession a human skull, which was extracted in my presence 
from a seam in the same valley, at about 50 feet lower still. 
These things prove conclusively that men and birds existed here 
when the shells which form our shell-rock were being deposited, 
and indicate either that men and birds have existed here from a 
very remote period, or that the deposit of sea-bottom, and sub- 
sequent geological upheavals and erosions, must have proceeded 
with far greater rapidity than is generally supposed.” 
Mr. W. SAVILLE KENT—well known as the author of “A 
Manual of the Infusoria,’ and many other publications on 
sponges, corals, and other subjects—has been appointed Inspector 
of Fisheries in Tasmania, and arrived in Hobart last July. We 
gladly welcome Mr. Saville Kent among us, and hope that he 
will find time to work up the Infusoria of Australasia. 
