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A Coal's Account of Itself.—"I cannot exactly remember," he went on to say, "how I was formed, except from tradition; but as the members of our family (and it is a very large one, for I have relations in Staffordshire, Lancashire, South Wales, Newcastle, Scotland, and indeed in most parts of the country) are pretty well agreed upon the point, I may take it for granted that the account is tolerably correct. You will scarcely believe me when I tell you that the ancestors of myself, and all my kith and kin, were trees—nothing more nor less than stems and leaves, which the rays of the sun had ripened and made green; and it almost makes me believe in the doctrine of metempsychosis, to find myself giving out that heat which the rays of the sun stored up in the leaves of my forefathers—so much so, that a celebrated engineer, George Stephenson by name, actually called us 'bottled sunshine.' If you don't believe it, examine me closely through a microscope when I have finished giving out my heat and become a cinder, and you will find, by treating me with nitric acid in a particular way, not only the structure of the tree, but will also be able to tell from what particular class of tree I descended."—Once a Week.

The Manufacture of Fossils.—At a meeting of the Manchester Geological Society Mr. J. Plant called the attention of the meeting to a serious fraud that had been going on for some time among excavators at the Macclesfield New Cemetery. The excavations had been made in gravels that belonged to the drift, and a number of fragments of shells belonging to a recent period, and occasionally a few nearly perfect, had been found by the workmen, and these had fallen into the hands of gentlemen interested in the geology of the locality. Encouraged by the pecuniary results of their discoveries some of the workmen had supplied spurious shells, obtained from their friends at Liverpool, Southport, or Ireland, and they had even robbed rookeries and garden plots that contained shellwork. The shells so obtained were subjected to the action of fire or acid, to deprive them of their epidermis, and to bring out a thin coating of white lime; to give them a true drift character they were afterwards shaken in a basket of gravel, and had imparted to them the necessary red tinge. Having no knowledge of species, some of the workmen had operated on West Indian and African shells, specimens of which Mr. Plant produced. But the most audacious fraud that they had attempted was the manufacture of a fossil. They had very cleverly set a mactra (stultorum) in a piece of Ketton oolite. The shell, which had the peculiar pink tinge of the species, was so cleverly cemented with the oolite that even an ordinary geologist might have been deceived. One of the workmen had said to a gentleman writing to Mr. Plant "that they had made a good thing of it. They had deceived the museums of London, Manchester, and Liverpool, and there had been a fine set of people asking them for the shells." Such a dispersion might lead to very erroneous deductions as to the origin of the diluvial drift of Macclesfield, and he (Mr. Plant) thought it right to mention the fraud to the society, so that it might be exposed.—Manchester Guardian.

Stanner Rocks.—I see a note in your last number respecting the capture of a female badger and her cubs at Stanner Rocks, near Kington, Herefordshire. Some of the students and lovers of nature who take Science Gossip may be glad to know that Stanner Rocks and the immediate neighbourhood possess peculiar interest for the naturalist. Stanner Rocks lie within a pleasant walk of the little country town of Kington, on the borders of Radnorshire, now easily reached by railway from Hereford or Leominster. They are very striking from the bold, rocky appearance they assume among the rounded hills of Hergest-ridge and Bradnor-hill which flank them. They are, in fact, the north-eastern extremity of masses of volcanic rocks, which in Worsel Wood, Hunter Hill, and Old Radnor Hill, are emptied in this district though the lower Wenlock, or Woolhope limestone, which is altered and metamorphosed into a crystalline, amorphous mass, well worthy of observation. The volcanic rock of Stanner is a particularly hard, dark, hypersthenic rock; and Sir R. Murchison, who described this ancient lava in his "Silurian System," five-and-twenty years ago, remarked that it resembled the hypersthenic Trap of Cornish, in the Isle of Skye. Before the submergence of by far the greater part of England during the glacial period, the volcanic rocks of Stanner, Hanter-hill, Worsel-wood, and Old Radnor were, no doubt, connected. The valleys and hollows between were evidently eroded and scooped out during that period, as large masses of this peculiar rock are scattered over the different hills to the north-east and north of the district, and portions are found in the drift that lies along the slopes of old red sandstone near Lyonshall, and other localities. The botany of Stanner-rocks is almost as interesting as the geology. When I was last there, two summers ago in the month of June, the rocks were purple with that rare and local plant Lychnis viscaria and the Geranium sanguineum, which grows nowhere else in the Kington district. I also gathered that very rare plant, Scleranthus perennis, which I believe only grows in two or three localities in Great Britain. A friend, who accompanied me, took several good beetles; and what with scenery, rocks, geology, botany, and entomology, we passed two very happy days among the old volcanic rocks of Stanner.—W. S. S.