45 
and are not half the size of white lipped specimens gathered 
near the Forest of Fontainbleau in France. 
There is one great reflection which above all others arises to 
the mind after considering a highly ornamented species like 
that before us. It is this: Can all the characters of living 
things be satisfactorily and sufficiently explained on the ground 
that they were developed by natural selection for the benefit of 
the species in question ? Or is it not a fact that while natural 
selection has unquestionably been a great agent in the^'werk of 
development, there are nevertheless to be found in many 
classes of living creatures, specially among shells and insects, 
decorations both of coloui’ and sculpture, for whose existence as 
no natural cause can be conceived of, a supernatural cause is 
postulated ? 
December 5th. —Mr. W. Keeping, M.A., read a paper on 
“ The Geology of the new Eailway Cuttings in the Cave District, 
South Yorkshire.’’ 
Mr. Keeping said that there are perhaps few areas in 
England which have been more carefully worked by Geolo¬ 
gists than the clifls of the Yorkshire Coast. Ever since the 
time of William Smith and Professor Phillips these cliffs have 
been frequently visited by scientific men, every foot of it has been 
carefully examined, and many valuable papers on their struc¬ 
ture have been published. But much less attention has been 
given to the interior of the county, where of course good rock 
exposures are fewer, and far less complete than in the clifls. So 
also the collections of fossils have been made mainly on the 
coast and not from the interior. This is very obvious in our 
own collections where, if we except the fine series of Malton 
and Whitwell fossils, only a very imperfect series of the inland 
Jurassic fauna exists. But these inland beds difler considerably 
from those described by Phillips at the coast, and it is left for 
us now to work out much of the detail of the variable groups 
of Jurassic rocks in the interior of the county. Looking at the 
geological map we see that the mass of the oolites of Yorkshue 
form an imperfect concentric mass around the vale of Pickering, 
the rocks dipping down on the north-west and south in a basin 
