Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/419

 7 feet blue sandy clay, with a few small quartz pebbles scattered through it, and no fossils ; 20 feet yellow, red, and grey sandy clay, with no fossils ; total 27 feet. Above this, 100 feet Postpliocene calcareous sandstone. About ten chains further west, we find upper Miocene beds full of fossils, consisting of hard, sandy ironstone, about 4 feet in thickness, resting on a bed of ferruginous pebble conglomerate ; this, again, rests on a loose ferruginous sandy bed, at high-water mark. The most abundant fossils of the upper bed are a large Pecten and the large branching Cellepora gambierensis. The pebbles of the conglomerate consist of rolled fragments of Miocene clay, containing fossils ; these are mingled with broken-up fragments of fossils and loose sand. This is the only pebble-conglomerate I have seen in the Miocene strata. Unfortunately it could not be traced beyond this point, owing to the fallen masses of the more recent Tertiary sandstone. A little further to the west we come on to a dark slate-coloured stiff clay, very rich in fossils, chiefly univalves. Among the principal ones are very fine specimens of Cyproea, Voluta, Fusus, Pleurotoma, Cerithium, &c. ; these fossils I have labelled No. 9 [see List of Corals, No. 9 p. 312]. A section about three miles west of the Gellibrand affords, above high-water mark : — 40 feet dark blue stiff clay, the same as that just mentioned, abounding in fossils ; 32 feet rather hard yellowish calcareous clay, containing very few fossils ; above this about 75 feet Postpliocene calcareous sandstone. This section is taken nearly at the apex of an anticlinal curve of the Miocene strata, which now dip N.W. at 5° for nearly a mile, when they become nearly horizontal, and are seen to be about 100 feet thick, with 20 feet more or less of Pliocene red clay, resting unconformably on them. These beds evidently belong to the Lower Miocene series. They very much resemble, both in their composition and the character of their fossils, the strata composing the cliff in the Orphan- Asylum Reserve, at Fyan's Ford, near Geelong. Prom here the strata gently undulate until within a short distance of Curdie's Inlet, when they dip to the west and disappear at sea-level. A section at the mouth of a creek about a mile west of the Sherbrook river gives, above sea- level : — 6 feet hard yellow limestone, containing very few fossils ; 30 feet bluish clay, rich in fossils ; 54 feet yellow calcareous clay with fossils; 10 to 15 feet Pliocene red sandy clay. The fossils from these beds, labelled No. 10, which may be classed as belonging to the lower portion of the middle series, consist chiefly of bivalves. At Port Campbell the cliffs are principally composed of beds of yellow sandy limestone, and yellowish-white calcareous clay, which dip S.W. at 5° ; they contain very few fossils. The uniformity in the colour of these beds, and the dim traces of stratification, render it difficult to ascertain the thickness of each bed. They exhibit numerous ' faults ' in the cliff-sections ; in the short distance of a mile I observed five or six of them.

" The cliffs at the mouth of Curdie's Inlet are only from thirty to forty feet high, composed entirely of a soft yellow limestone, containing very few fossils, excepting two or three small species of