I will here describe in more detail than has been as yet incidentally done, the nature, origin, and extent of the great shingle covering of Patagonia: but I do not mean to affirm that all of this shingle, especially that on the higher plains, belongs to the recent period. A thin bed of sandy earth, with small pebbles of various porphyries and of quartz, covering a low plain on the north side of the Rio Colorado, is the extreme northern limit of this formation. These little pebbles have probably been derived from the denudation of a more regular bed of gravel, capping the old tertiary sandstone plateau of the Rio Negro. The gravel-bed near the Rio Negro is, on an average, about ten or twelve feet in thickness; and the pebbles are larger than on the northern side of the Colorado, being from one or two inches in diameter, and composed chiefly of rather dark-tinted porphyries. Amongst them I here first noticed a variety often to be referred to, namely, a peculiar gallstone-yellow siliceous porphyry, frequently, but not invariably, containing grains of quartz. The pebbles are embedded in a white, gritty, calcareous matrix, very like mortar, sometimes merely coating with a whitewash the separate stones, and sometimes forming the greater part of the mass. In one place I saw in the gravel concretionary nodules (not rounded) of crystallised gypsum, some as large as a man’s head. I traced this bed for forty-five miles inland, and was assured that it extended far into the interior. As the surface of the calcareo- argillaceous plain of Pampean formation, on the northern side of the wide valley of the Colorado, stands at about the same height with the mortar- like cemented gravel capping the sandstone on the southern side, it is probable, considering the apparent equability of the subterranean movements along this side of America, that this gravel of the Rio Negro and the upper beds of the Pampean formation northward of the Colorado, are of nearly contemporaneous origin, and that the calcareous matter has been derived from the same source.