322 The Irish Naturalist. 



"tea-leaf," a name which aptly expresses its appearance. 

 This is the result of a foliated structure, the folise being very 

 irregular in form, and their faces, as revealed on breaking 

 the clay, being extremely smooth and shining. The '' tea- 

 leaf" clay passes upwards imperceptibly into typical Boulder- 

 clay, dark brown in colour, very hard, fine, and smooth in 

 texture, and containing a fair number of pebbles, generall}^ 

 rather small, and most of them glaciated ; also occasional 

 blocks of large size ; and sparingly scattered marine shells, 

 usually in fragments, with now and then a scrap of lignite. 



Our first visit to this interesting deposit was on the occasion 

 of an excursion of the Dublin Naturalists' Field Club on 28th 

 April, 1894 ; what we saw on that occasion decided us to 

 return, and since then we have paid frequent visits to the 

 localit}^ The advantages of working this section were two- 

 fold — the constant excavation presented continually new faces 

 of the clay for examination ; and the workmen were speedily 

 induced to pick out and preserve every shell or other organic 

 object that they observed. In these ways a representative 

 collection of the rocks and fossils contained in the deposit 

 was speedily accumulated. The workmen showed industry 

 and observation in their collecting ; their instructions were 

 to preserve anything in the nature of a shell which the}- found 

 in the pit, and their findings showed curiously how extraneous 

 objects make their way even to an isolated spot like this. 

 We have no reason to believe that their collecting was not 

 genuine ; 3'et it was surprising to receive among numerous 

 glacial fossils a fresh specimen of an Oliva and two of a 

 foreign Nassa, in addition to oysters, cockles, limpets, and 

 periwinkles which were evidently of recent origin ; but even the 

 freshest of the shells natural to the clay could be distinguished 

 from all these at a glance, by their different texture, colour, 

 and state of preser^-ation. The weakest point in the men's 

 collecting was that pieces of small or fragile shells were likely 

 to be passed over or smavShed. 



The following is an annotated list of the shells obtained ; 

 we have added the exivSting range of each species with reference 

 to Great Britain. We are much indebted to Messrs. Iv- T. 

 Newton, F.R.S., and Percy F. Kendall for assistance given in 

 the determination of some of the fragments. 



