Page:Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London, vol. 26.djvu/530

364 PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [Mar. 9, ing corals — among others, a peculiar branching coral, frequently occurring in the Stamford Oolite, but as yet, I believe, undescribed.

Beneath this is a bed of about two feet of calcareous rock, thinly stratified — and under all a bed (one foot thick) of ironstone, thickly studded with small bodies, which are either rolled pebbles or concretionary nodules. I am disposed to assign this and the overlying beds of this section to my Lower Division (E) of the Northampton Sand.

This ironstone bed is divided from the underlying blue clay of the Upper Lias by a zone of a few inches of mixed material.

I may here mention, in passing, that I obtained from this Upper Lias Clay the new species of Crustacean described and figured by Mr. H. Woodward, F.G.S., in his " Fourth Report " on Fossil Crustacea in the ' Transactions ' of the British Association for 1868, and which he has done me the honour to name Peneus Sharpii. I have also obtained from the same clay a very large head, some vertebras, and scutal plates, of a Teleosaurus of an undetermined species.

Before leaving this Kingsthorpe area, I would mention that, about thirty-five years ago, a shaft was sunk in search of coal, at a point near the summit of the high ground of Kingsthorpe (marked on the map with a X). A depth of 967 feet was reached. At a depth of 860 feet, the blue clay of the Lower Lias was pierced, and is stated to have been succeeded by " 80 feet of Sandstone, 12 feet of Red Marl, and 15 feet of Conglomerate," which are described upon the same authority as " New Red Sandstone ; " but the authority I believe to be unreliable upon this point.

It will be a matter of surprise that a renewal of the attempt to find coal by means of this very shaft, should during the past year (1869) have been urged in the ' Mining Journal ' and in a local newspaper, by a Mr. Ruglin, of Mexborough, near Sheffield, and that people should have been found who were disposed to listen to his suggestions.

Area II. Northampton.

In the area of Northampton, there is only one small spot (j) at which the Limestone of the Great Oolite (A) occurs ; and it has been here preserved in consequence of a slight double or triple fault, which let down, some 5 or 6 feet below its normal level, a patch about 55 feet in diameter*. The whole area was afterwards planed over by denudation ; and this remnant of the general bed of limestone was alone left, inlaid, as it were, in its underlying clay. This curious fact was only disclosed in November last, when, in the process of levelling land at the back of the borough goal for building-purposes, the following section was exposed : —

in this area, the upper beds are very much broken up by similar small faults, occasioned probably by the washing out of underlying soft or arenaceous beds.
 * Along the brow of the escarpment of the branching valley of the Nen river