Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 25.djvu/232

 by metamorphic changes during the age of elevation which marked the close of the Palaeozoic age in China, have hitherto resisted the action of the great solvent.

Other facts of interest in connexion with the geology of the districts treated of are, the absence of glacial action south of the Yangtse, and the large deposits of rich iron-ore, together with considerable quantities of coal, in the central provinces, while the careful study of the Tertiary and modern beds may probably at some future period throw light on the vexed question of the antiquity of the human race.

Discussion.

The President remarked that if the South of China had been dry land since so early a period, the fauna might have been expected to resemble that of the Siwalik Hills. Among the teeth was the molar of a very small horse, presenting some of the characters of Hippotherium or Hipparion, which might possibly be of Miocene date.

Prof. T. Rupert Jones alluded to the general parallelism of the axial folds of the strata with the coast-line, and to the similar strike of the gold-bearing rocks in the Gulf of Petchele, and mentioned that Cycadaceous remains occurred in the coal of some parts of Germany as in China.

Mr. W. Boyd Dawkins remarked that one of the equine molars was the largest of the class he had seen. He agreed with the President as to the smaller molar. He was unable, from the specimens, to determine whether they were Miocene or Pliocene. He mentioned the discovery in the laterite of India of a portion of a human femur of most remarkably slender make.

January 13, 1869.

William Groome, Esq., B.A., of St. John's College, Cambridge, was elected a Fellow ; and Dr. J. F. Brandt, of St. Petersburg, Prof. A. E. Nordenskiold, of Stockholm, and Prof. F. Zirkel, of Kiel, were elected Foreign Correspondents of the Society.

The following communications were read : —

1. On Hyperodapedon. By T. H. Huxley, F.R.S., Pres. Geol. Soc. A LITTLE more than ten years ago, namely, on the 15th December 1858, Sir R. Murchison read a paper " On the Sandstones of Elgin " before this Society. It was followed by an essay of my own " On the Stagonolepis Robertsonii," an animal so named by Prof. Agassiz in his ' Poissons fossiles du Vieux Gres Rouge ' from some impressions of its dermal covering which had been discovered in the Elgin sandstones. In the latter paper, and in notes added to both papers, before their publication in the middle of the following year, the fact that Stagonolepis was a reptile closely allied to the Mesozoic Croco-