230 bulletin: museum of comparative zoology. 



The fossiliferous strata of St. George Island, 1 mentioned by Professor 

 Rice, seem to me to belong to the same category of rocks which crop out 

 in Hamilton Harbor. They are seolian rocks containing many species 

 of Lucina, Chama, and the like; and as all the marine shells near 

 Agers Island must have found their way into these seolian strata under 

 the action of the winds or the sea, the parts of the strata below high- 

 water mark have here also been partly changed into the hard ringing 

 limestone of the base rock. Professor Heilprin also found marine shells 

 in seolian rocks. 2 In a hill to the eastward of Stone Hill I have found a 

 few recent land shells in very friable seolian rock. 



An interesting collection of rocks and sub-fossils from the aeolian rock 

 quarries and other localities is preserved in the Government Building. 

 It contains among other specimens a small collection of casts of Telli- 

 nas and Lucinas obtained from a submarine cut in Tomlin's Narrows, 

 sixteen feet below low-water mark. This would indicate the existence 

 of a bay or sound, as in our day, at the time when the level of the sea 

 was higher, before the land had by subsidence obtained its present level, 

 and it is no indication of elevation any more than the presence of the 

 living shells of to-day as fossils would indicate such a change. It also 

 contains the shell of a tropic bird egg found in seolian rock quarries in 

 the Middle Road in Devonshire, the bones of a snipe 1 obtained from 

 seolian rock near St. George, and marine shells from a bed twenty feet 

 above the sea and one hundred feet away from it, occurring in seolian 

 rock on the main road from the north side of Gibbs Lighthouse 

 Hill. There is also in the Government collection a large Turbo, which 

 was found in a cutting in seolian rock at the east end of Hamilton ; 

 this Turbo is said to be extinct, but is found sub-fossil in the highest 

 seolian hills. 



1 I would consider the peculiar conglomerate of Stocks Point as only the higher 

 limit of a local beach rock, which may have been thrown up in a locality specially 

 exposed to gales or hurricanes, and limited in extent. It contains fragments of 

 the underlying drift rock, and resting upon it, as Eice observes, is the ordinary drift 

 rock. But on both sides of the beach rock we find seolian drift rock reaching to the 

 sea. which would indicate either a fault or that the conglomerate was older than 

 the aeolian bills of the Bermudas, neither of which suppositions is in accordance 

 with other facts observed in the vicinity. 



2 "At several points, more particularly along the north shore, I found marine 

 shells (Lucina, Tellina, etc.) embedded in unquestionable drift rock, and indeed it 

 could hardly have been expected that such association should not occur. . . . The 

 same is also true in a measure of the occurrence of land snails. . . . One of the 

 commonest shells of the lower drift rock is the large Tiirhn (Livona) }»rn, a shell 

 which appears to be very abundant about the coast." Heilprin, Bermudas, p. 35. 



