322 THE CARBONIFEROUS SYSTEM. 



New Glasgow Bridge, we may designate as tlie " New Glasgow Con- 

 glomerate." At New Glasgow this conglomerate dips at a liigh angle 

 to tlie north, but at the Middle River and several other places it is 

 found dipping to the south, and the relations of the Coal measures to 

 it on the northern side of the Albion Mines trough, in the vicinity of 

 New Glasgow, would seem to render it certain that the conglomerate 

 underlies the productive Coal measures, and crops out from beneath 

 them on an anticlinal line. This would give it the geological position of 

 the Millstone-grit series, but no such massive conglomerate is known 

 in that series elsewhere, though there are conglomerate beds of minor 

 dimensions. Again, the beds on the north side of the conglomerate, and 

 evidently overlying it, are not those of the productive Coal measures 

 as developed at the Albion Mines, but Coal measures of minor im- 

 portance, believed to represent the Upper Coal formation ; and these 

 supposed Upper Coal fonnation beds exhibit very regular northerly 

 dips, as if they had not participated in the foldings and fractures of the 

 beds of the Middle Coal formation. Lastly, toward the Middle River 

 there appears, rising from beneath the conglomerate, a series of hard 

 and altered grits and coarse shales, with obscure remains of fossil 

 plants, which were pointed out to me in the summer of 1866 by Mr 

 John Campbell, and which I believe to be an island of older rock 

 which must have penetrated the Carboniferous beds, and protruded 

 above them at the time of their deposition, representing on a very 

 small scale the attitude of the Cobequid Hills with reference to the Coal 

 formation of Colchester and Cumberland. 



These statements being premised, as well as the further fact that 

 the opinions of geologists in regard to this conglomerate have oscillated 

 between the extreme views that it is a bed overlying the Middle Coal 

 measures, and forming the base of the Newer Coal formation, and, 

 on the other hand, that it is the Lower Carboniferous conglomerate 

 thrown up along the line of an anticlinal, — I proceed to quote from 

 the first edition of this work and the supplement thereto, published in 

 1860, the reasons which I then assigned for believing that it is a 

 contemporary beach of shingle, limiting the area of deposition of the 

 thick coal seams of the Albion Mines area, and giving rise to their 

 exceptional character. This view Avas first advocated in my paper 

 on the structure of the Albion Coal Measures in the Journal of the 

 London Geological Society, 1853 ; and the reasons for it are thus 

 given in the first edition of this work : — 



" 1. The outcrop of tlie conglomerate extends from a point opposite 

 the promontory of metamorphic rock east of the East River to the 

 high lands of Mount Dalhousie, in the eastern extremity of the Cobe- 



