NEWS has been received recently that Prof. Franz Eduard Suess, emeritus professor of geology in the University of Vienna, the son of Eduard Suess, died in Austria about a year ago, aged seventy-four. After many years on the Austrian Geological Survey, he occupied several academic posts before his appointment to the chair in Vienna in 1911. As an enthusiastic pupil of Becke, he was one of the first to make use of the petrology of metamorphism to interpret the history of rocks, a method he applied in grappling with problems of the crystalline massif of Moldanubia and studies of the deeper parts of mountain ranges where intrusions play an important part, Later, he integrated his opinions by enunciating a theory of mountain building through loading caused by the carriage of a moving 'creative mass' over a passive foreland. The ranges as they exist to-dayresult from the erosion of this structure. Fragments of the load left bychance can be distinguished from the loaded under-ground by the different grade of metamorphism they display, and a passage can be traced from the loaded to the unloaded part of the old foreland. It follows that the occurrence of a mass of crystalline schists in a mountain system is no evidence that they are older than fossiliferous sediments not far away inthe unloaded region. Indeed, the sedimentary rocks in the' creative mass' may be as old as the schists and gneisses formed below them. He regarded the Caledonian and Variscan ranges of Europe, Asia and America as types of this orogenesis.