Introduction and General Description. C harnwood Forest , as is well known, is a hilly district composed of a number of rather parallel ridges with a general trend from N.W. to S.E. These hills rise to a height of a few hundred feet above an undulating plain of Mesozoic rocks, which on the eastern side is interrupted by the wide valley of the Soar. They consist of rocks most of which are more or less metamorphic; but some are igneous; isolated bosses also crop up here and there from the surrounding Trias. This deposit runs, as it were, in fjords into the recesses of the older rocks, besides dividing the district by a kind of strait or sound. To the S.W. and S. the Trias stretches far away; but on the W. (not, however, much modifying the configuration of the district) lies the Leicestershire Coal-field. A boss of hornblendic granite, Mountsorrel, crops up at the western edge of the Soar Valley; and three or four masses of a somewhat similar rock occur at a greater distance to the south. These most likely are all outliers of the highland region of the forest, which is really the culminating point of an old mountain-land. This was probably to some extent defined before the Carboniferous epoch, and formed a scattered group of hilly islands in the Triassic waters. The district has been investigated by Professor Sedgwick, Professor Jukes, Professor Ansted, the Rev. W. H. Coleman, and several others. An exhaustive list of the papers upon