GEOLOGY OF BLACK POINT. 103 



which inclose Deeva Bay, and stretch out like a 

 pair of compasses to embrace the archipelago of the 

 Thousand Islands. The seaward sides of both these 

 mountainous promontories are curiously scarped 

 away, so as to form very steep precipitous faces of 

 bare rock ; and at places where it has room to lie, 

 there is an extensive talus of muddy and shaly de- 

 tritus brought down from the sides of the mount- 

 ains by the action of frost and avalanches : these 

 mountains are each about twelve hundred feet in 

 height, and this may be stated as about the average 

 height of the lower ranges on both sides of East 

 Spitzbergen. The granitic peaks of the central 

 range are much higher, but they are every where 

 quite inaccessible, and are only to be seen here and 

 there peeping out from among the glaciers. Black 

 Point is composed of a dark gray or mud-colored 

 limestone and sandstone of a soft and shaly de- 

 scription, which is stratified very numerously or 

 minutely, and with almost exact parallelism to the 

 sea ; only in one or two small places did I observe 

 slight bends or deflections from the horizontality 

 of the stratification ; in the lower part of the prec- 

 ipice there is, among the sandstone, an irregular- 

 looking band of dark brown or brownish-black coal, 

 but this, for the greater part, is concealed by the 

 talus before mentioned. The limestone contains 

 a great number of fossils, many of which I col- 

 lected. 



Black Point and Whalefish Point are both very 



