82 A. E. Verrill—The Bermuda Islands; Geology. 
these fossils. If this snail was really the extinct Nelson’s snail, this 
lower hard limestone, and probably the associated red-earth, belonged 
to the Walsingham formation. 
The peat and stumps may have belonged to a later period than 
the red-clay and the limestone below it, but according to some 
accounts the fossil snails and trees were all found in the layer of red 
soil.* Bones of an unknown bird are also said to have been found 
in this red soil. Probably these materials were not taken out with 
sufficient care by the workmen to enable any one to determine their 
exact relations. 
In dredging out the channel in Hospital Bay, about 25 years ago, 
large numbers of the trunks of cedar trees, in pretty good preserva- 
tion, were brought up. They were overlaid by a peat bog, and over 
this was a deposit of shell-mud and shell-sand, with foraminifera, ete. 
Masses of peat, evidently derived from a submerged peat-bog, 
were dredged up by me and my party in 1901, in the channel of 
“The Reach,” north of the Swing Bridge, where the depth of water 
was about 15 to 20 feet. 
A bed of red-clay was found between layers of seolian limestones 
while blasting out the reefs to deepen the channel at the entrance of 
St. George’s Harbor, in 1847-8. 
Roots and stumps of cedar trees have been pulled up on the 
anchors of vessels several times, both in Ilamilton and in St. George’s 
Harbors. There is, therefore, good reason to believe that Hamilton 
Harbor, St. George’s Harbor and the “Reach” were once marshes 
or peat-bogs, with cedar trees in the drier parts, like the Devonshire 
marshes, for example. By subsidence and the encroachment of the 
sea, the peat beds have been buried at the bottom of the harbors 
Peat, as well as cedar wood, if buried under the salt-water mud, 
would last almost indefinitely. If openly exposed to the water, the 
cedar would soon be destroyed by the “ship-worms” (7Zeredo), 
which abound here. 
Such peat bogs might have come to be below the sea-level by a 
long period of subsidence, before the encroachment of the sea, just 
as some of the existing peat bogs now extend far below sea-level. 
That was, indeed, probably the case, for otherwise the sea would 
have rapidly worn away the peat to which it had access on the shore. 
* See Jones, J. M., Visitor's Guide to Bermuda, 1876, p. 119. Also ‘‘ Recent 
Observations in the Bermudas,’ Nature, vi, p. 262, 1872; ditto, Amer. Journ. 
Science, Ser. 3, vol. iv, p. 414, 1872. Reprint. 
