THE RHATIC BEDS. 5 
the Tea Green Marls at the base of. our Needwood Rhetics. 
Like the latter, they are unfossiliferous and calcareous, and, in 
fact, resemble them in every particular. They are- succeeded 
upwards by 40 feet of black shales, the lower 18 feet being alone 
fossiliferous, and containing a few sandy partings with Axis 
cloacinus and Cardium Rheticum. The upper part of the 
40 feet of shales is much more earthy and far less fissile than 
the paper-shales of the lower part. Throughout the shales there 
are a few lines of lenticular nodules of septaria, or concretionary 
masses of argillaceous limestone—cement stones, in fact. Organic 
matter is present in the shales in considerable quantities, and 
from the large amount of calcium phosphate and pyrites with 
which it is associated, and from the entire absence of vegetable 
remains, its animal origin cannot for a moment be doubted. 
Considering the immense number of fish and molluscs whose 
dead bodies must have contributed to the formation of this shale, 
the comparative paucity of recognisable organic remains is some- 
what remarkable. 
Wilson and Quilter found a few specimens of Cardium 
Kheticum, Axinus cloacinus and Cassianella contorta; but 
during a somewhat lengthy search 1 was unable to find any of 
these. At the very base of the shales, however, I found some 
small phosphatic nodules containing fish remains. 
The one point which interested me more than any other in 
this section was the line of junction between the black shales 
and the underlying Tea Green Marls. Instead of there being 
anything like a passage of one set of beds into another the 
line of junction is marked by adsolute abrupiness, but the two 
sets of beds are perfectly conformable, and there are no signs 
whatever of contemporaneous erosion. If I had possessed a 
proper cutting tool, I could have brought home a hand specimen, 
which would have clearly shown the line of junction. 
Now let us consider for a moment what this sudden change of 
sedimentation implies. 
The Tea Green Marls, blending as they do insensibly into the 
underlying Red Marls, differ from the latter only in the fact of 
