102 Cruise of the "Alert." 



in which position they resembled the blocks of concrete which one 

 often sees near a pier or breakwater in course of construction. 

 Close to where we landed we found portions of the silicified trunk of 

 a tree, resting on the debris at the foot of the cliff, its fractured ends 

 exhibiting a jagged appearance, as if the fragment had not long 

 previously been broken from the parent stem. It was two and a half 

 feet long by a foot in diameter, and presented well-marked sections 

 of the concentric rings of growth. In one of the rock pools closely 

 adjoining we found also a smaller water-worn fragment, which we 

 were able to annex as a specimen. The sandstone cliff above us 

 exhibited well-marked lines of stratification, dipping to the south- 

 ward at an angle of about 1 5 , and in the talus at its base were 

 several large globular masses, which consisted almost entirely of 

 fossil shells, bound together by a matrix of soft clayey sandstone. 

 Conspicuous among these shells were examples of the genera 

 Baculites and Cardium. While the lowest rock in the series of 

 strata was a hard grey sandstone, full of fossil shells, and forming 

 a kind of level terrace skirting the beach, and a wash at high tide, 

 on the north side of the bay this last-mentioned rock was con- 

 tinuous with another horizontal terrace, which ran at a somewhat 

 higher level, as if introduced there by a fault in the strata. It 

 was a coarse, unfossiliferous conglomerate, composed of angular 

 pieces of shingle bound together by a hard but very scanty matrix, 



