408 Dr. A. Irving—Sections of Bagshot Beds. 
The conical shape and abrupt appearance of the island, in the 
middle of the sea, were probably sufficient to cause it to be regarded 
as a volcano by voyagers, as none of them refer to having witnessed 
any of the ordinary volcanic phenomena, and but very few ever 
actually landed on the island. 
As all recorded dates of the periods when these islands were seen 
by travellers are of considerable interest, the following should be 
added to those given in my previous paper. According to Col. Yule 
Narcondam is first referred to by Linschoten in the year 1598 under 
the name of Viaconddm. In Surgeon Finlayson’s account of Craw- 
furd’s mission to Siam we find the following under the date Dee. 8, 
1821:—‘On the following morning, at sun-rise, we were within 
sight of Narcondam, an island apparently several miles in diameter, 
in form and shape a perfect specimen of the volcanic cone, which 
we calculated to be about two thousand five hundred feet above the 
sea. We were at too great a distance to entertain a hope of landing 
on it. This island from its height, its solitary existence in a wide 
sea, and its singular and beautiful form constitutes a very striking 
object.” 
Dimensions or NarconpDaM. 
Maximum) diameter or Mlislandeien cw va aneeeeneeee tee ateeeee 24 miles. 
Circumference ce a reccencs aah creeccnice Macro arca scone nctea ete Cana 
MPOISRD. ceeesaectemecte secuerscee senate: eehionts Relea gratin cas mme eee 2330 feet. 
V.—Sections or Bacsuot Beps at FincHAMPsSTEAD, BERKS. 
By the Rev. A. Irvine, D.Sc. (Lond.), B.A., F.G.S8. 
ONSIDERING the interest that has been awakened of late 
in the Bagshot Beds of the London Basin, and the paucity 
of good sections open to the light of day exhibiting any con- 
siderable vertical range of those beds, it has occurred to me that 
a fuller description of these Finchampstead sections may be of 
sufficient interest to students of Tertiary geology to justify its 
appearance in the pages of the Gronocican Macazinu.’ In the task 
we have before us of attempting to work out the old physical geography 
of the Lower Thames Basin in later Eocene times, every contribution 
of facts (by no means the easiest part of inductive science) must be 
welcome to students of the subject. The problem was sketched in its 
outlines and bequeathed to his successors by the versatile mind of the 
late Prof. John Phillips, F.R.S. “In considering these remarkable 
strata (he says,” of the London Bagshot Beds), which were accumulated 
in a period so near, geologically speaking, to our own, we are pre- 
sented with problems of great interest, which, if they can be solved, 
will have more than local application. Whence came the materials, 
the clay, the sand, the pebbles? In what direction, by what forces 
' The Editor much regrets the delay which has arisen in the publication of this paper. 
2 “Geology of Oxford and the Valley of the Thames,’’ p. 450. There is a slight 
error on the same page: ‘‘the highest land which [the Bagshot beds] reach in this 
area’’ is the plateau of Cesar’s Camp and Beacon Hill south of Aldershot, not 
Hampstead Heath. He is, I believe, also in error in ascribing the ‘flint-pebbles ’ 
to river-action so far as the rounding of them is concerned. 
