12 Mr. Konig on I he Rock Spi'cimens 



collected during the voyage performed by Captain Parry in tlie 

 years 1819-20. It was drawn up from rather slender mate- 

 rials, immediately after the return of the Expedition. Although 

 I am fully sensible of the little value of desultory remarks made 

 under such circumstances, yet I think that the interest, insepa- 

 rable from every the smallest communication connected with 

 those most important investigations, that have been and are 

 still carrying on in the polar seas by that enterprising naviga- 

 tor, will plead your apology as well as mine, for submitting 

 them to the readers of the Journal of Science. 



We may conclude, from the nature of the rock specimens 

 collected on the former voyage for discovering the North-West 

 Passage, that both the east and west coast of Davis' Strait and 

 Baffin's Bay are composed of primitive formations, in con- 

 nexion with others of a more recent date, which for the greatest 

 part belong to several members of Werner's trap formation. It 

 would appear, however, from the paucity of specimens decidedly 

 referable to trap rocks among those brought from Baffin's Bay 

 by the late Expedition to the Arctic Seas, that the same forma- 

 tion is less prevalent on the western coast. While on the west 

 coast of Greenland it exists in all its different gradations, but 

 more particularly in the form of amygdaloidal transition trap, 

 with many of those minerals which are usually found nidulating 

 in it, such as calcedony, agate, jasper, green earth, §-c., no 

 traces of any of these substances are seen among the specimens' 

 collected by the Expedition in its progress down the western 

 coast of Baffin's Bay, where the principal rocks are gneiss and 

 micaceous quartz-rock, with some ambiguous granitic compound, 

 in which hornblende seems to enter as a subordinate ingredient. 



In the latitude of the entrance into Sir John Lancaster's 

 Sound, the specimens which I had an opportunity of seeing, 

 begin to indicate the predominance of older traps, with other 

 concomitant transition rocks. Among them the more promi- 

 nent are fragments (many indeed only detached from boulders,) 

 of well-defined syenite, with red, and others with greenish-grey 

 feldspar, the latter approaching to compact in its texture. 

 Epidote, wliicii is frequently seen in this syenite, has in some 



