Mineralogy and Geology of Nova Scotia. 255 
ping at an angle of ten or fifteen degrees, passes beneath the trap, 
which it supports throughout the whole extent of the North 
mountains. 
In our first short visit to this cape in 1827, we discovered in 
the sandstone no foreign remains, or veins of gypsum ; but since, 
by taking advantage of another landing-place where it gradually 
slopes down to the water’s edge, we have met with numerous veins 
of the gypsum, some of which, the fibrous and granular varieties, 
were more than a foot thick, and had been severed away and 
broken into smaller masses, by the falling of the trap rocks from 
above. Many of these masses presented the delicate whiteness 
of pure snow, and were in striking contrast with the huge 
masses of trap that were lying among them; others consisted of 
broad folia of transparent selenite. The only vegetable organic 
remains we observed, were a few indistinct casts of culmiferous 
plants highly carbonized; they indicated to us the probable exis- 
tence of bituminous coal in the vicinity, and afford very positive 
evidence of the igneous origin of the overlying trap rocks, in 
converting them into their present charred or coal-like state. 
We were not, however, so fortunate as to meet with any regular 
beds of coal in this sandstone, so near its junction with the trap ; 
a discovery, which would be of great practical value to the 
inhabitants, and which may yet be made. Nor were we enabled 
to remark in the two rocks any very decisive marks, evincing the 
former action of one upon the other, excepting that the distinct 
line of their junction was occasionally obscured by the passage 
of one into the other; and angular masses of them both were 
united into a sort of breccia, which assumed, in its finer varieties, 
the character of genuine reddish amygdaloid, of a semi-vitrified 
appearance, and having its cavities filled, as usual, with zeolites. 
