Neighbourhood of Killarney and Dublin. 44-3 



districts, the immediate neighbourhood of Killarney, and the 

 environs of Dublin, both of them attractive and easily acce ss- 

 ible to English visitors. 



Any geologist, in glancing over the southern portion of Mr. 

 Griffith's map, would be struck by some novelties and many 

 apparent incongruities in the arrangement of the strata. The 

 greatest portion of the S.W. district is described as belonging 

 to those older rocks which have been noticed by Mr. Weaver 

 and others as underlying unconformably the old red sand- 

 stone of the Gaulty Mountains, &c. 



In direct junctio7i with these slaty rocks we see the coal- 

 field at Calurbarna, the mountain limestone at Killarney, and 

 the old red sandstone generally. 



Under the title of old red sandstone we have included the 

 coarse and uniform conglomerate of the Gaulty Mountains 

 and the roofing slates of the Vale of Middleton ; but while 

 these are so thrown together, we perceive a regular and uni- 

 form band intervening between the old red sandstone and the 

 mountain limestone, which Mr. Griffith has thought worthy of 

 being separated into a distinct formation, and has designated 

 the "yellow sandstone." This yellow sandstone appears as if 

 invariably found immediately over the old red sandstone, 

 and is surmounted in all places north of a line drawn from 

 Dunmanway to Cove by the mountain limestone, but south of 

 this line we have another new formation, which takes the 

 place of the limestone, and which he designates as " carbo- 

 niferous slate." The scale of rocks at the head of the map 

 leads us to suppose either that these two formations alternate 

 with each other, or that there is some doubt as to which is the 

 oldest ; into that doubt I can fully enter, for the only junc- 

 tions I have seen are very obscure. 



I need not allude to any details of the description given by 

 Mr. Weaver of this district in the fifth volume of the Trans- 

 actions of the Geological Society of London, as he has re- 

 ferred the whole of it to transition greywacke and limestone, 

 an opinion from which Mr. Griffith and myself totally dis- 

 sent ; and it is with less hesitation that I do so, as the de- 

 scription of the gap of Dunloe shows the rapidity with which 

 Mr. Weaver must have hurried over a place where he did 

 not notice that junction between the Cambrian rocks and the 

 old red sandstone, which exhibits, even from the high-road, a 

 most striking instance of unconformability. (PI. I. f. 1. and 2.) 

 In Mr. Griffith's map, published by the Railway Commissioners 

 in 1838, the country south of the line from Dunmanway to 

 Cove was represented as belonging to the older rocks, and 

 an unconformable junction was traced as occurring at Ring- 



