136 



The proceedings of this Club during the past year have been fully published in 

 the reports of the transactions at our Field Meetings. A few brief extracts only 

 from the President's retiring address are now given.* 



ON THE PASSAGE BEDS OF THE OLD EED 



SANDSTONE AT LEDBURY. 



By Mr. George H. Piper, F.G.S. 



Referring to the first Field Meeting at Ledbury, on Thursday, May 24th, 

 1883, Mr. Piper said :— On quitting the railway carriages the celebrated Passage 

 beds lying near the mouth of the tunnel, and almost entirely within the limits of 

 the station yard, were thoroughly inspected. These are called Passage Beds be- 

 cause here the great system of Old Red Sandstone, which reaches from Skomer 

 Island in the Irish Channel and St. Anne's Head, Milford Haven, right away 

 to Ledbury, without any break whatever — except some half dozen miles of Car- 

 boniferous Formation near Haverfordwest — passes into the Upper Silurian sys- 

 tem by a series of beds, twenty in number, and of various thicknesses, with an 

 aggregate depth of about 400 feet. Some of the least important of the Passage 

 Beds would appear to be of Silurian Mud and Shales, but nearly the whole belong 

 to the Old Red Formation ; I am not aware that any pure Silurian fossil has been 

 discovered in the series, for although I found in 1882 in the Silurian band oppo- 

 site the entrance to the tunnel, and not many feet below the top of the Passage 

 Beds, a small Trilobite five-eisrhths of an inch in length, I am not prepared to say 

 it belongs exclusively to the Silurian Formation. The general conformation of 

 the beds affords a rare opportunity for studying physical geology, and I would 

 counsel an early inspection, for the line of demarcation will soon become obliter- 

 ated ; indeed, in some instances great obscurity has already arisen, but as I have 

 made careful admeasurements of the whole section, and have noted the bands 

 wherein fossils are specially located, the searches of future explorers will be much 

 facilitated. The value of this work will be seen when I state that of the 400 feet 

 of Passage Beds the portions yielding fossils of interest would not give a total of 

 25 feet, and several of the thicker beds would a)ipear to be unfossiliferous. Geolo- 

 gists will remember that heads of the Old Red Sandstone Fish, Auchenaspis, were 

 found here, and at Ludlow, almost simultaneously in the year 1858, but simply the 

 head plates. Our much valued member, Mr. Symonds, who graced our meeting 

 by his presence on the occasion of the Club visit, and who is beyond doubt one 

 of the most eminent of living geologists, says in his Records of the Rocks (page 202), 



* Some apology is here necessary for presenting our members with extracts oniy'hom the 

 President's retiring address. It is promised us that the very important subject of T/ie Passage 

 Beds of the Old Red Sandstone at Ledluiry, — the most important which has demanded the atten- 

 tion of the Geologist of the County of Herefordshire for many years, — will be treated, in extenso, 

 by Mr. Geo. H. Piper in his forthcoming paper on the Geology and Physiography of the Ledbury 

 district. — Ed. 



