It was supposed till very lately that few if any Mammalia were to be found below the Tertiary rocks, _i. e._ those above the chalk; and this supposed fact was very comfortable to those who support the doctrine of “progressive development,” and hold, with the notorious _Vestiges of Creation_, that a fish by mere length of time became a reptile, a lemur an ape, and finally an ape a man. But here, as in a hundred other cases, facts, when duly investigated, are against their theory. A mammal jaw had been already discovered by Mr. Brodie on the shore at the back of Swanage Point, in Dorsetshire, when Mr. Beckles, F.G.S., traced the vein from which this jaw had been procured, and found it to be a stratum about five inches thick, at the base of the Middle Purbeck beds; and after removing many thousand tons of rock, and laying bare an area of nearly 7000 square feet (the largest cutting ever made for purely scientific purposes), he found reptiles (tortoises and lizards) in hundreds; but the most important discovery was that of the jaws of at least fourteen different species of mammalia. Some of these were herbivorous, some carnivorous, connected with our modern shrews, moles, hedgehogs, &c.; but all of them perfectly developed and highly-organised quadrupeds. Ten years ago, no remains of quadrupeds were believed to exist in the Secondary strata. “Even in 1854,” says Sir Charles Lyell (in a supplement to the fifth edition of his _Manual of Elementary Geology_), “only six species of mammals from rocks older than the Tertiary were known in the whole world.” We now possess evidence of the existence of fourteen species, belonging to eight or nine genera, from the fresh-water strata of the Middle Purbeck Oolite. It would be rash now to fix a limit in past time to the existence of quadrupeds.--_The Rev. C. Kingsley._ FOSSIL HUMAN BONES. In the paleontological collection in the British Museum is preserved a considerable portion of a human skeleton imbedded in a slab of rock, brought from Guadaloupe, and often referred to in opposition to the statement that hitherto _no fossil human hones have been found_. The presence of these bones, however, has been explained by the circumstance of a battle and the massacre of a tribe of Galtibis by the Caribs, which took place near the spot in which the bones were found about 130 years ago; for as the bodies of the slain were interred on the seashore, their skeletons may have been subsequently covered by sand-drift, which has since consolidated into limestone.