action may be very complex, so that it is often difficult or impossible to separate the results of one from those of the other at any particular place. Still I believe we may generally regard the external form of a mountain-chain as due to marine, and the valleys within it as the result of atmospheric erosion. Most of you will be aware that the views I have thus endeavoured to place before you are not altogether original; other persons have before now proposed the same method of explanation of the form of ground. M. Charpentier long ago referred the origin of the valleys of the Pyrenees to the action of the rivers which traverse them. Mr. Dana had pointed to the same action as the cause of the wonderful system of ravines that furrows the sides of the Blue Mountain range in New South Wales, and of the deep ravines separated by knife-edged ridges which radiate from the centres of the high islands of the Pacific. I confess, however, that I had, up to the present year, hesitated to accept this explanation without reserve; and therefore, since I am now convinced of its truth, I am anxious to take the earliest opportunity of recording that conviction*. Mr. Prestwich, in his recent papers read before the Royal Society, has adopted the hypothesis of the subaerial deepening of the valleys of the Somme and the Seine, and other river-valleys both in France and England, to account for the formation of the freshwater gravels which he finds on the flanks of those valleys, so high above the present levels of the rivers or of any possible floods. Professor Ramsay has in like manner attributed the formation of the hollows in which the lakes of Switzerland lie, to the ploughing action exercised on the subjacent rocks by the action of the glaciers, when far more extensive than now. The formation of lakes lying in "rock-basins," and not formed by the mere stoppage or damming up of a river, had always been a complete puzzle to me until I read Professor Ramsay's paper in the last Number of the Geological Journal (May 1862). I believe his explanation of their origin to be the true one. That he and Mr. Prestwich and myself should all, within the space of the same twelvemonth, have been compelled to appeal to external atmospheric action as the only method of explaining the origin of the different surface-phenomena we were studying, is of itself, I think, good evidence that we are all three pursuing the right track in our search after truth. At the instant of penning this sentence, I see by a newspaper paragraph that Dr. Tyndall follows us in his speculations as to the origin of the valleys of the Alpst. * Had I not become previously convinced of the extent and power of atmospheric and river action in consequence of my own observations, all scepticism must have yielded to the proof of it detailed in the admirable Report by Dr. Newberry on the Geology of the Colorado River of the West, published by the United States Government at Washington in 1861. It was only in February 1863 that I saw this work through the kindness of Dr. Newberry, who himself transmitted to me a copy of it. The beautiful maps and plates and the numerous woodcuts illustrate the text in a way that puts to shame the miserable niggardliness of our own Government in such matters; for here they are either committed to the red-tape ignorance of mere clerks whose duty it is simply to curtail expenditure, or to the equally uninstructed indifference of higher officials in dread of the well-meant but blundering questioning of some man of figures in the House of Commons, or still oftener left to the enterprise of some publisher, who has of course his profit to make out of the work. An advertisement at the beginning of the American Report shows that the Senate of the United States ordered ten thousand extra copies of it to be printed, five hundred of which were given to the officer commanding the expedition. Dr. Newberry shows in his Report that the wonderful cañons which traverse much of the country of California, and some of which are from 5000 to 6000 feet deep, and only wide enough for the waters of the rivers to flow through them, have been cut down by those rivers through horizontal and quite undisturbed beds belonging to the Carboniferous, Devonian, and Silurian periods into the Granite below, and moreover that wide valleys in other parts have also been excavated by the gradual action of atmospheric erosion, leaving numerous perpendicular torrs, crags, or pinnacles of rock here and there, all showing the same horizontal beds. + A subsequent reading of Dr. Tyndall's paper, and of a notice of it afterwards by Professor Ramsay, showed me that Dr. Tyndall was inclined, at the time of writing it, to attribute the Alpine valleys too exclusively to the action of glaciers. The valleys must have been commenced and many of them almost completed before the glaciers, although the As a concluding observation, allow me to remark how curiously the threefold physical agencies that are in simultaneous operation on the crust of the globe were typified in the old heathen mythology. The atmosphere which envelopes the land and rests upon the sea, the ocean which fills up the deeper hollows of the earth's surface, and the nether-seated source of heat and force that lies beneath the crust of the earth are each personified in it as a great divinity. If one of the old Greek poets were to revisit the earth, and clothe these ideas in his own imagery, he would tell us in sonorous verse of Zeus (or Jupiter), the God of the Air, ruling all things upon the land with his own absolute and pre-eminent power; of Poseidon (or Neptune) governing the depths of the ocean, but shaking the shores which encircle it; and of Hades (or Pluto), confined to his own dark regions below, tyrannizing with all the sternness of a force irresistible by anything which can there oppose it, but rarely manifesting itself by any open action within the realms of the other divinities. On an Early Stage in the Development of Comatula, and its Palæontological Relations. By Professor ALLMAN, M.D., F.R.S. The subject of this communication was a small Echinodermatous animal, a single specimen of which was obtained by the author on the south coast of Devon, where it was found attached to one of the larger Sertularidæ, dredged from about four fathoms' depth. The author regarded it as one of the early stages in the development of Comatula, and though quite distinct from the well-known Pentacrinus stage of this crinoid, believed that it had been witnessed both by Thompson and Dujardin, but not correctly described or figured by either of them. It consisted of a body borne upon the summit of a long jointed stem. The body had the form of two pyramids placed base to base. The upper pyramid is formed of five triangular valve-like plates, moveably articulated upon the upper side of the lower pyramid, and capable of being separated from one another at the will of the animal, so as to present the appearance of an expanding flower-bud, and again approximated till their edges are in contact and the original pyramidal form restored. From between the edges of these plates, long flexile tentaculoid appendages, which must not be confounded with the permanent arms of Comatula, are protruded in the expanded state of the animal, and within these is a circle of shorter, more rigid, rod-like appendages which seem to be moveably articulated to the upper side of the calyx, immediately round the centre, where it is almost certain that the mouth is placed. The lower pyramid or proper calyx is mainly formed of five large hexagonal plates, separated from the summit of the stem by a zone, whose composition out of distinct plates could not be demonstrated, and having five small tetragonal plates intercalated between their upper angles. In assigning their proper value to the several plates thus entering into the body, the author regarded the lower zone, which rests immediately on the stem, as simply a metamorphosed joint of the stem itself, while the verticil of plates, situated immediately above this, is the true basilar portion of the calyx. The five small intercalated plates are the equivalents of the radialia, and destined to carry afterwards the true arms of the crinoid; while the five triangular plates which constitute the sides of the upper pyramid are interradialia. Professor Allman considered the little animal described in this communication as of special interest, in the light which it seemed capable of throwing on the real nature of certain aberrant groups of Crinoidea, such as Haplocrinus, Coccocrinus, &c., in which the calyx supports a more or less elevated pyramidal roof, composed entirely or in great part of five triangular plates, which find their homologues in the five sides of the pyramidal roof of the little crinoid which formed the subject of his paper. On Bituminous Schists and their Relation to Coal. By Professor ANSTED, F.R.S. The occurrence of rocks of all geological periods, and in most parts of the world, containing a sufficient quantity of the mineral hydrocarbon to be worth distilling present depth, width, and regularity of many of them are doubtless ascribable to glacier action. 1862. 5 for various economic purposes is well known; and there are certain cases in which there is an apparent passage from the shale or schist containing so large a quantity of these mineral oils as to burn like fuel, into true coal, which also sometimes contains a large quantity of hydrogen, and can be distilled for some purposes with advantage. The chief object of this paper was to direct attention to some of the rocks known among geologists as bituminous schists. Two deposits of this kind have long been known in France, and have recently been visited by the author,-one between Nantes and Rochelle, in the BourbonVendée, the other near the town of Autun. The former are called the Feymoreau schists, and they were distilled with success in 1830 for paraffine oil, other light burning oils, and lubricating oils, by the method since patented by Mr. Young, Owing to the absence of means of communication, the works were suspended; and afterwards M. Selligué, the inventor of the process, carried on similar operations with greater success near Autun, where there is now a very large manufacture of light oils and paraffine. The Feymoreau schists resemble in appearance the rich Torbane Hill mineral of Scotland, and resemble both that and Boghead coal very closely, but they cannot be used as fuel; they only yield about 15 per cent. of light oils. They are very thick, but do not extend far in a horizontal direction. They underlie the coalmeasures, or rather the productive part of the measures, and almost represent the underclay of a poor coal-seam. In this respect also they resemble the Scotch bituminous shale. The Autun schists occur considerably above the highest seam of coal in the coalmeasures. They are quarried or obtained from drifts. They are thick shales, bearing no resemblance whatever to coal, and not in any way capable of being used as fuel. The best varieties yield 50 per cent. of oils of all kinds, but others are very poor. They are moderately rich in paraffine. The shales of the paper-coal, near Bonn, on the Rhine, are also used for distilling, and paraffine is made from them; they have no resemblance whatever to coal, and could not be mistaken for it. The lias-shales (Posidonia-schists) in many parts of Germany are also distilled for the light oils and paraffine, with some success. Bituminous schists of all geological dates, some passing into coal and others hardly distinguishable from common clay, thus exist in many parts of the world, and all agree in the one important point, that they may be used for obtaining certain valuable products by special treatment. "It is important," the author concluded, "that such substances should be recognized as a class, and not mixed up with or mistaken for coals, and that there should be some understanding among scientific and practical men what coal is, and in what it differs from certain minerals containing hydrocarbons sometimes associated with it." On a Tertiary Bituminous Coal in Transylvania, with some remarks on the Brown Coals of the Danube. By Professor ANSTED, F.R.S. The deposits of mineral fuel on and near the Danube are, for the most part, lignites or brown coal. These are extensive, and have been much used. The fuel burns freely, and can be employed for all purposes; but it has two faults. It contains a large percentage (averaging 15 per cent.) of hygroscopic water, and it falls to powder on exposure to air, especially in changeable weather. It is uneconomical, and cannot be stored. These deposits are newer Miocene; they occur in and with sands not converted into sandstone, and marly clays not shales. They are generally in lenticular masses, unconnected one with another. These lignites do not occur in the smaller mountain-valleys of the Carpathians. In their place, in the Zsil valley, is a disturbed deposit, also tertiary, and also containing mineral fuel; but the fuel is here an excellent bituminous coal, and not a brown coal. There are twelve well-defined workable beds, one of them varying from 30 feet to 50 feet thick, four others 5 feet to 10 feet, and the rest smaller. They are associated with good hard coal-grits, shales, and ironstone bands, Two of the coal-beds are well marked by an overlying bed of fossil shells (a species of Cerithium). All these coals are nearly free from hygroscopic water, and stand exposure for years without injury. They have been examined by the authorities at the Geological Institute at Vienna, and found to consist of carbon 57-8, ash 6.5, water 2.1, and the carbonic unit is stated at 5582. This is equal to the average of Austrian bituminous coal, and very much superior to the average of brown coal. There is no doubt of the tertiary origin of the Zsil coal. The beds containing it have, however, been much altered and broken, and since covered by unconformable tertiary rocks of newer date. Above these again is a thick gold-alluvium. In conclusion, the author drew attention to the fact that coal, like salt, is limited to no geological period, and required no high temperature either to elaborate the plants of which it was made, or to complete the conversion of the vegetable matter into coal. There is no volcanic district at all near the locality in which the Zsil coal occurs. There is no underclay beneath the Zsil coal, nor is there beneath the Liassic and Cretaceous coals, somewhat extensively worked on and near the Danube or in the Carpathians. These coals have therefore, in all probability, been formed of transported vegetable matter. The presence of a true bituminous coal of economic importance in a geological position hitherto limited to lignite, the author submits as a fact too important to pass without being placed on record. On the Glacier Phenomena of the Valley of the Upper Indus. The glaciers noticed in this paper are supposed to be of greater extent than any yet known; they occur in that part of the great Himalayan chain which separates Thibet from Yarkund, in E. long. 76°, and N. lat. 35-36°, and extend over an area about 100 miles from east to west, from Karakorum Peak, No. 2 (28,265 ft.), to the Mountain of Haramosh. The glaciers which supply the Hushé River, which joins the Indus opposite Kapeloo, were first described. Those of the upper portion of the valley take their rise on the southern side of the Peak of Masherbrum, and are about 10 miles in length, The Great Baltoro Glacier takes its rise on the west of Gusherbrum Peak; on the north it is joined by a great ice-feeder which comes down from Peak No. 2; opposite to it, from the south, is another; both of these extend 9 or 10 miles on either side of the main glacier. This, from its rise to its further end, measures 30 miles; its course is from E. to W.; the breadth of the valley along which it flows is 12 miles. It receives numerous tributaries along its course, some of which are 10 miles and more in length; two of them, on the N., lead up to the Mustakh Pass into Yarkund (18,000 ft.), whence a glacier descends to the N.E., about 20 miles in length. The Nobundi Sobundi glacier takes its rise from a broad ice-field which lies to the N. of lat. 36°, and has a S.E. course for 14 miles, with numerous laterals; it then turns S., when it bears the name of the Punmah Glacier; about 5 miles from the termination it is joined by a glacier from the N.W., 15 miles in length. The Biafo Glacier is perhaps the most remarkable of any of this part of the Himalayan range; it has a linear course of upwards of 40 miles; the opposite sides of the valley are very parallel along its whole length, and the breadth of ice seldom exceeds a mile, except where the great feeders join it from the N.E. From the summit-level of the Biafo Gause a glacier is continued westward to Hisper in Nagayr, 28 to 30 miles in length. The Chogo, which terminates at Arundoo, takes its rise between the Mountain of Haramosh and the Nushik Pass; it is about 24 miles in length, with numerous branches from Haramosh, 8 miles in length. The waters from all the glaciers, from that of Baltoro in the E. to Chogo in the W., are collected into the Shigar River, which joins the Indus at Skardo. All these glaciers carry great quantities of rock-detritus. The blocks on the Punmah Glacier are of great size. The author next described the groovings and old moraines of a former extension of the glaciers in this region, showing that they reached many miles beyond their present terminations, and rose upwards of 400 feet above their present levels. The paper also described the thick alluvial accumulations of the valley of the Indus, particularly those of the neighbourhood of Skardo, On a New Species of Plesiosaurus from the Lias near Whitby, Yorkshire. By Dr. A. CARTE, F.L.S., and W. H. BAILY, F.G.S. The very large and perfect Plesiosaurus, the description of which formed the subject of this communication, was discovered in the Lias at the Kettleness Alumpits, near Whitby, on the 27th of July, 1848, and presented by the Marquis of Normanby to the late eminent Surgeon, Sir Philip Crampton, as a mark of regard for his scientific attainments, who, in accordance with the anxious desire he always felt for the advancement of science, bequeathed it to the Royal Zoological Society of Dublin, in whose Gardens it was first exhibited to the public in May 1853; that Society, with the same object in view, has now deposited it in the Museum of the Royal Dublin Society, where every facility is offered for the study of this magnificent and largest example of the genus known. The total length of this skeleton (of which a drawing of the natural size was exhibited), measured in the line of its vertebræ, is 22 ft. 5 in. It lies in very nearly a natural position, resting upon the ventral surface, with the head and neck slightly inclined towards the right side; the head, with the under jaw, is in a good state of preservation, and, being freed from the surrounding matrix, the principal bones composing it may be easily recognized; the vertebral column has throughout its entire length fallen over towards the right side, presenting a slight irregular curve; it exposes in the cervical series a side view of the centra or bodies of the vertebræ, with their large neural spines (neurapophyses), and in some instances remains of the cervical ribs or hatchetshaped bones (pleurapophyses), the bodies of the dorsal vertebræ being almost entirely concealed, the massive ends of the neural spines and transverse processes projecting prominently above the general surface. The caudal portion of the vertebral column is somewhat dislocated and thrown out of position, especially near its junction with the sacrum; the bodies are, however, in some cases well exposed, with their spines and processes. The ribs, thirty in number, are spread out on either side of the dorsal vertebræ, those of the left side being almost in their natural position. The anterior paddles are extended from both sides, on a plane nearly at right angles with the head and neck, the right posterior paddle stretching out in a direction parallel to the anterior, that on the left side inclining more towards the tail; in this paddle the tarsal bones, with their phalanges, are deficient, that portion having been unfortunately carried to the calcining-heap before it was observed. The following are some of the principal measurements of this species, which it was proposed to call Plesiosaurus Cramptoni. Total length of skeleton... Length of the skull from the point of the premaxillaries to Length of the lower jaw, from the symphyses to the extremity Breadth of lower jaw across the tympanic condyles. ft. in. 22 5 211 3 10 1 101 1 3 06 Breadth of skull across the snout Ileight of skull at posterior end, from angular piece of lower ( Height at extreme point of snout 1 1 05 Length of cervical portion of vertebræ, twenty-seven in number 6 0 8 0 Length of caudal, about thirty-four (some of the terminal ver tebræ being deficient) ver-} 5 6 (Total number of vertebræ which can be counted ninety-one.) Length of humerus . 1 9 Breadth of humerus at radial extremity 0 10 Length of radius ...... 0 6 Breadth of radius at proximal extremity 05 Length of ulna. 061 Breadth of ulna at proximal extremity. |