Page:Transactions of the Geological Society, 1st series, vol. 4.djvu/227



In the marly part of this stratum a fossil is found resembling a cane or jointed bamboo. It is rarely obtained more than five inches long, generally curved, but sometimes straight, and of all degrees of thickness from a quarter of an inch to five inches. These fossils lie in great disorder, and are apt to separate at their joints on extracting them from their matrix; and many appear to have had their joints separated as they lay in the sandstone, the ends of the joints being covered with a thin coat of quartz. Many of these fossils have their hollows between the joints filled with hard sandstone, but the greater part have their centres quite filled with the hardest white quartz; and where there are cavities, which rarely happens, they are sometimes found to contain crystals of calcareous spar.

When I first discovered these fossils, ten years ago, I found them upon the beach just under the sandstone rock, and took them for corallines; but having since found them abundantly in situ, and examined a number of them more minutely than before, I am induced to regard them as juncous bodies. I know not at least how to class them as corals, since they have not the smallest trace of any passage from one joint to another. Should they be ranked however among the coralline bodies, they must be allowed to be of a very singular nature.

Below the beds containing these fossils a grey limestone is found, in which no traces of marine bodies appear. On the top of this limestone is a thin bed of very yellow marl, and then a thin bed of purple and blue marly earth. Then appears the red sandstone containing the cane fossils, six feet thick. Above it is another bed of