22 BULLETIN: MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. 
place, here covered by patches of coral reefs and there by fragments of 
sandstone reefs. These beds also seem to lie close to the base of the 
series, for about the mouth of Riacho Doce and scattered among the 
exposures are big granite boulders, many of them more than a metre 
in diameter, apparently weathered or washed from a heavy basal 
conglomerate. 
The bituminous shales at Riacho Doce are fossiliferous, containing 
abundant diatoms, plant fragments, and fish remains. The diatoms are 
fresh-water forms, while the land plants are too fragmentary for identi- 
fication. One fossil fish was identified by Mr. Е. A. Lucas of the U. 6. 
National Museum as Diplomystus laticostatus Cope, a form that is found 
also at Bahia. 
The dips of the beds vary greatly in amount and considerably in di- 
rection, but the general direction is landward, — toward the red bluff that 
rises on the west. This bluff is a beautiful example of the weathered 
sediments ; it is about a hundred metres in height, half a kilometre or 
more in length, and is most brilliantly colored. Seen from the beach 
half a kilometre away, the beds appear to be horizontal. 
A noticeable feature of the dips at all the exposures on the coast is 
that they are landward. A section at Riacho Doce would fit most of 
the cases thus far seen. 
Some of the most accessible localities at which these beds are to be 
seen are at and about the city of Olinda near Pernambuco. There is a 
good exposure at Olinda about a hundred metres northwest of the Vara- 
douro station in the rear of a wine factory. Here the beds are horizon- 
tal, lumpy, yellowish rocks containing fossils; the exposure is at the 
base of the hill, and the thickness visible is six or seven metres. My 
friend, Dr. Louis Lombard, formerly Director of the Escola de Engenha- 
ria of Pernambuco, showed me some fossils collected by him from beds 
exposed on the Olinda beach at low tide. 
The hill on which the Carmo church stands is of mottled beds toward 
the top, while near the base small patches of the yellowish fossiliferous 
rock appear here and there. On the slope of the hill below the Church 
of Sáo Francisco the mottled and the yellow limy rocks are mingled in a, 
newly opened drainage ditch. 
About a kilometre west of Olinda are some typical exposures of the 
colored beds known as the Ruinas de Palmira. These “ruins” are at 
about the same elevation as the upper parts of the Olinda hills. 
At Maria Farinha limy fossiliferous beds are exposed about the bases 
of all the hills near the mouth of the river and along the estuary for 
