Roald Amundsen himself brought back altogether about twenty specimens of various kinds of rock from Mount Betty, which lies in lat. 85deg. 8’ S. Lieutenant Prestrud’s expedition to King Edward VII.  Land collected in all about thirty specimens from Scott’s Nunatak, which was the only mountain bare of snow that this expedition met with on its route.  A number of the stones from Scott’s Nunatak were brought away because they were thickly overgrown with lichens.  These specimens of lichens have been sent to the Botanical Museum of the University.

A first cursory examination of the material was enough to show that the specimens from Mount Betty and Scott’s Nunatak consist exclusively of granitic rocks and crystalline schists.  There were no specimens of sedimentary rocks which, by possibly containing fossils, might have contributed to the determination of the age of these mountains.  Another thing that was immediately apparent was the striking agreement that exists between the rocks from these two places, lying so far apart.  The distance from Mount Betty to Scott’s Nunatak is between seven and eight degrees of latitude.

I have examined the specimens microscopically.

From Mount Betty there are several specimens of white granite, with dark and light mica; it has a great resemblance to the white granites from Sogn, the Dovre district, and Nordland, in Norway.  There is one very beautiful specimen of shining white, fine-grained granite aplite, with small, pale red garnets.  These granites show in their exterior no sign of pressure structure.  The remaining rocks from Mount Betty are gneissic granite, partly very rich in dark mica, and gneiss (granitic schist); besides mica schist, with veins of quartz.

From Scott’s Nunatak there are also several specimens of white granite, very like those from Mount Betty.  The remaining rocks from here are richer in lime and iron, and show a series of gradual transitions from micacious granite, through grano-diorite to quartz diorite, with considerable quantities of dark mica, and green hornblende.  In one of the specimens the quantity of free quartz is so small that the rock is almost a quartz-free diorite.  The quartz diorites are:  some medium-grained, some coarse-grained (quartz-diorite-pegmatite), with streaks of black mica.  The schistose rocks from Scott’s Nunatak are streaked, and, in part, very fine-grained quartz diorite schists.  Mica schists do not occur among the specimens from this mountain.

Our knowledge of the geology of South Victoria Land is mainly due to Scott’s expedition of 1901 —­ 1904, with H. T. Ferrar as geologist, and Shackleton’s expedition of 1907 —­ 08, with Professor David and R. Priestley as geologists.  According to the investigations of these expeditions, South Victoria Land consists of a vast, ancient complex of crystalline schists and granitic rocks, large extents of which are covered by a sandstone formation ("Beacon Sandstone,” Ferrar), on the whole horizontally