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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: APPENDIX. NOTE 1. Page 2. j|UR hills are not without special interest for the geologist. A question which I proposed to a scientific friend, who was my guest here last summer, " Are the Quantocks part of the Old red sandstone formation ? " has led to an interesting paper on the subject, from which I extract the concluding summary. I gather from it, that no absolute decision can be arrived at from such roadside sections as alone are accessible. It would seem that a mightier power than the hammer of the geologist is needed, and that unless some potent wizard arise, like " the wondrous Michael Scott," who spake the words That cleft the Eildon hills in three,1 the interior structure of the axis of the Quantocks will remain a secret of the past. 1 Scott's Lay of the Last Minstrel, ii., 13, 7. " Suffice it to say, that there are two theories respecting those beds which intervene between the Silurian and Carboniferous formations. On the one hand, the late Professor Jukes, correlating them with certain Irish beds with which he was more familiar, and viewing them especially from a physical point of view, pronounced fhem to be identical with the Carboniferous slates of Cork, which attain in some places a thickness of 2,000 feet. Thus, according to his view, they ought stratigraphically to be placed between the top of the Old red and the base of the Goal measures. On the other hand, Mr. Etheridge, Palaeontologist of H. M. Geological Survey of England, viewing them purely from an English point of view, and laying more stress upon their Paleeonto- logical contents, affirms that they are one great and well- defined system called Devonian, divisible into three groups, lower, middle, and upper, each of these divisions characterised by a distinct marine fauna, and possibl...