Messrs. Harvison 8^ Jukes- Browne — Geology of Barbados. 553 



and of it he writes, " at the foot of the terrace north of Bath .... 

 is a horizontal bed of sand containing small rounded pebbles of the 

 harder old calcareous rocks and lumps of the Oceanic Clay. This 

 stratum is succeeded by a coral-formation," which he calls the 

 Bath Reef Series. He gives a diagram of this section showing 

 Pleistocene coral-r*ock overlying, with apparent conformity, four or 

 five feet of stratified sand which contains pebbles of an older 

 limestone, and he assumes that this sand is of the same age as the 

 mechanical marl of his Fig. 1, though the places are nearly two 

 miles apart and the material of the two deposits is totally different. 



Apparently his only reason for correlating tlipse two deposits 

 is that both contain pebbles of an older limestone, and he jumps to 

 the conclusion that these pebbles have been derived from the same 

 set of rocks, for in the legend of his Fig. 2 he describes the calcareous 

 pebbles in the Bath deposit as "rounded pebbles of the White Lime- 

 stone " (i.e. his Oligocene Antiguan formation). Now this section 

 is known to us, and the limestone pebbles are certainly there, but 

 all those which we obtained were fragments of the yellowish 

 Globigerina limestone of the Bissex Hill Beds ; many of them 

 contain casts of small cup-shaped corals which are common in the 

 Glohigerina limestone, but which Prof. Gregory was unable to name. 



Dr. Spencer does not mention the Bissex Hill Beds, which were 

 established in 1898 as a separate group of intermediate age between 

 the Oceanic Series and the Coral Reef Series,^ so that we do not 

 know how he would group them, but the rock is very different from 

 those which he refers to the Oligocene. 



It is quite possible that fragments of the older reef-rocks may 

 also occur in the basement-bed of the Bath reef, for that is a low- 

 level reef, only 150 feet above the sea, and may well contain debris 

 from the higher and previously uplifted reefs ; but what then ? 

 Dr. Spencer's reasoning seems to be as follows : — No. 1 is a 

 mechanical deposit. No. 2 is a mechanical deposit, both occur at 

 about the same level, and both contain pebbles of older limestones ; 

 therefore, both are of the same age ! We cannot accept such an 

 argument as having any logical value. 



From the above remarks it will be seen that Dr. Spencer's evidence 

 completely breaks down : he fails to connect the basement-bed near 

 Bath with his Ragged Point marl; he fails to show that the latter 

 is older than the Pleistocene reefs, or that it is anything but 

 a superficial terrestrial deposit. In point of fact he fails to establish 

 his ' Ragged Point Series ' as an independent formation. We are 

 quite aware that there are mechanically formed calcareous deposits 

 of terrestrial origin in many parts of the island, and they have 

 probably been formed at different times during the gradual upheaval 

 of the area, but if Dr. Spencer's methods were followed it would 

 not be difiicult to make out five or six ' formations ' or ' series ' 

 in the later rocks of Barbados or in those of any other raised 

 coral island. 



1 See Messrs. Franks & Harrison, " On the Globigerina Marls of Barbados," in 

 ^uart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. liv, p. 540. 



