1 1 4 MR. £. W. BINNEY ON THE PEBMIAN BEDS 



About two years ago, Sir Charles Lyell, M.A., F.R.S., 

 when in Manchester, showed me some breccias which he had 

 lately collected in the vicinity of the Shropshire coal-field. 

 In these specimens was a cream-coloured limestone, somewhat 

 resembling a common mountain limestone, except that it had 

 a porcelain-like appearance, possessed a slightly conchoidal 

 fracture, and contained no fossil organic remains. This rock I 

 immediately recognised, merely from its external character, 

 as one of the so-called freshwater * limestones of the upper 

 part of the coal-field, like those of Leebotwood and Uffington, 

 near Shrewsbury; Lane End, Staffordshire ; Ardwick, near 

 Manchester ; and Whiston, near Liverpool ; and I then re- 

 marked that it had not travelled far, but had been derived 

 from the neighbouring coal-field. 



Now, in the specimens of limestone found in the breccia at 

 Irby Hall, some of them have been a good deal decomposed 

 by water containing carbonic acid gas in solution, and many 

 of the fossil corals have been thus brought out of their 

 matrices and exhibited in relief. The Syringopora ramulosa 

 and other corals I have collected. But the most interesting 

 specimens from this locality are some pieces of an upper car- 

 boniferous limestone, like those before mentioned, and no 

 doubt derived from a portion of the neighbouring Black 

 Burton coal-field, containing undoubted specimens of the 

 Microconchus carbonarius and Cypris inflata, as well as 

 pieces of a peculiar flinty-looking chert which I have not 

 hitherto met with any where in the north-west of England, 

 except at Ardwick. 



The occurrence of a carboniferous rock is what might have 

 been expected from the vicinity of the neighbouring coal-field, 

 since the rocks of the permian breccia or conglomerate, as I 



* See papers by the author On the Origin of Coal, vol. VIII. (second series), 

 pages 157 and 185, and On some Trails and Holes found in Rocks of the Car- 

 boniberous Strata, vol. X., page 199, of the Society's Memoirs, where he gives 

 his reasons for the marine character of the strata of the coal measures. 



