80 A, HK, Verrill—The Bermuda Islands; Geology. 
At these places the beach deposits vary in thickness from 1 or 2 
feet up to 4.feet or more. They are irregular and variable within a 
few hundred feet. They are rather hard, laminated, with pretty 
thin layers, which dip toward the sea at small but variable angles. 
They rest either directly upon the flat corroded surfaces of the hard 
Walsingham limestones, > and 6’, or upon a layer of partially indu- 
rated red-clay that overlies the latter. They also overlie the sur- 
face of a hard limestone (0’), which at this place contains remarkably 
perfect examples of the “ fossil palmetto stumps.” (See plates 
referred to above.) These beach-beds contain numerous marine 
shells, mostly of common existing species. 
The beach-limestones are marked ¢ and c’ in the plates and in the 
diagrammatic section (fig. 11). In the best sections they are overlaid 
by a bed of very imperfectly consolidated drifted sand, 3 to 6 feet 
thick, which was here washed out into cavernous places by the pre- 
vious hurricane (see p. 72). But a short distance farther west these 
loose beds, or their equivalent, become gradually harder and in some 
places cannot be distinguished from the overlying xolian limestone 
(e, e’). The loose sand-bed contained in its lower parts a few sepa- 
rated shells of marine bivalves, mostly Mytilus, and numerous speci- 
mens of Pecilozonites Bermudensis in good preservation, but no 
extinct species, so that it doubtless belongs to the newer series. In 
other shore sections, in continuation with those figured, the beach- 
rocks were lacking and the later xolian limestones, like e, e’, rested 
directly on 0’. 
Professor Stevenson’s description of the locality at Devonshire 
Bay was as follows:— 
“The intermediate deposit, or marine limestone, covers the broadly 
irregular surface of the limestone. It reaches to the water-level, on 
the southwest side of the old fort, but is seven or eight feet above 
it on the northerly side. The rock is hard in the lower portions, 
but becomes soft above, disintegrating readily and passing, as far as 
extent of consolidation is concerned, very gradually into the over- 
lying deposit. It is slightly conglomerate in the upper portion. 
The structure is very similar to that of the sandstone, the laminz 
being thin and inclined in all directions. The hardness of the rock 
is not due to spray, or to the washing of the present tides, since it is 
as marked on the northerly as on the southerly side of the fort. 
Livona, Chama, Tellina and Areca oceur in prodigious numbers, 
the shells of Zivona being as large and as perfect as those dredged 
