The recent retirement of Sir Andrew Ramsay from the post of Director-General of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, affords us a fitting opportunity to place on record in the pages of the Geological Magazine a short account of the career of this eminent living geologist.

[The following communication, although addressed to the Editor in the form of a letter, is of such importance that we need make no apology for treating it as an Original Article, feeling sure that our readers will be as much interested as ourselves in the observations of so eminent a geologist, who has spent many years in actual study of these vast deposits, as to the origin of which he is consequently able to speak with such profound knowledge and mature judgment. —Edit. Geol. Mag.]

The Terraces which are so conspicuous in many valleys of Western Europe, and have been largely studied in France and Britain, have given rise to a great deal of discussion. The polemics which they have suggested have been not merely about details, but about fundamental principles, and it is these fundamental principles which are still unsettled and awaiting a solution. In England at all events it may be said that every solution which is current, and there are many, fails to meet the facts, and the majority of them are singularly suggestive of the dangers of Deductive methods of reasoning.

A correspondent of the “Coblenzer Zeitung,” dating from “Höhr, 27th December,” writes that on the preceding day two meteorites fell near the road leading to the former frontier, in the direction of Ballendar, and that the fall was attended by a very characteristic explosion. The editor of the above journal has been unable to gather any further particulars of the occurrence beyond the fact that the stones fell in a wood, and could not be discovered.

Of the fauna of the Dyas Credner remarks that it is much poorer than that of Carboniferous times, and with the exception of a few reptiles and fishes, limited to the marine formation of the series. of all the lower forms Brachiopoda are by far the most prevalent, and furnish the most characteristic and most widely distributed of Zechstein remains. Lamellibranchiata assume, however, an importance unknown to them in earlier periods, and in their general character tend more towards Mesozoic than Palæozoic forms; he even suggests that Schizodus may be considered the ‘precursor (Vorläufer) of the Trigonia’