Prof. Cole & T. HalUssy—The Wexford Gravels. 499 



Society of Dublin,' when he described, as widely spread in the county 

 of Wexford, a stratum of rolled gravel, 9 to 12 feet thick, " beneath 

 a stratum of calcareous clay marl, of a drab colour." He notes that 

 the shells in the gravel are sometimes very numerous, that the bed is 

 possibly of the age of the Crag of Norfolk, and that the shelly raised 

 beaches of Ireland are distinctly of later date. 



T. Oldham, who was in communication with Griffith and with 

 Griffith's colleague. Sir Henry James, emphasized some of these 

 points in 1844,^ but he apparently added nothing on his own account. 

 Henry James ^ recorded his personal observations in 1846, and defined 

 the Wexford succession as consisting of rolled and waterworn pebbles 

 at the base, then sand, gravel, and drift, the last being considered to 

 be of the age of the northern drift. A large block of coal was found 

 in clays at Rathaspick near Wexford, which Grifiith thought was 

 wood-coal from Antrim. E. Forbes named the fossils that were 

 collected, including seventy molluscan species, fifty-five of "which are 

 living in British seas. Fustis contrarius {^Nepttmea contraria) is said 

 to occur a hundred times more numerously than the right-handed 

 form. E. Forbes visited the Wexford area personally, and published 

 his conclusions and his lists of species in the same year.* He states 

 (pp. 377-8) that the shells indicate the parallelism of Newer Pliocene 

 and glacial strata. 



Robert Harkness next examined the deposits in 1869.^ While his 

 conclusions seem to us fully justified, he overlooks several important 

 features in the field. He states, for instance (p. 549), that a Lower 

 Boulder-clay is probably absent in Wexford, and that the gravels 

 have no boulder-clay above them in the sections near the town 

 (p. 544), which is true for certain cases only. He makes the 

 important observation (p. 543) that at Castle Ellis about 40 feet 

 of reddish-brown boulder-clay, with beautifully striated blocks, 

 principally from Cambrian and Silurian strata, overlie the sands 

 and gravels. From this he compares the gravels with those of 

 Howth, which lie between two boulder-clays, and (p. 547) with 

 those of Aberdeenshire and Caithness. 



Harkness, with great justice, attributes the flints found in the 

 gravels to some source in adjacent land now worn away. He places 

 this land, however, in the English rather than the Irish Channel. 

 From the nature of the shells he states that the gravels represent 

 a less rigorous climate in Middle Pleistocene times. 



E. Hull,^ fully acknowledging the work of Harkness, placed the 

 Wexford gravels with those of Killiney and Three-rock Mountain 



^ Journ. Geol. Sec. Dublin, vol. i. p. 151, 1837. The address was given on 

 February 10, 1836. 



- " On the more Eecent Geological Deposits in Ireland " : Journ. Geol. Soc. 

 Dublin, vol. iii, pp. 62, 66. 



•' "Note on the Tertiary Deposits of the Co. Wexford " : ibid., pp. 195-6. 



■* "Distribution of the existing Fauna and Flora of the British Isles, and 

 Geological Changes, etc." (Mem. Geol. Sui-v. Great Britain), vol. i,p. 336, 1846. 



^ "On the Middle Pleistocene Deposits " : GEOL. Mag., 1869, p. 542. 



•^ " Observations on the general relations of the Drift Deposits of Ireland to 

 those of Great Britain " : Geol. Mag., 1871, p. 294. Also Physical Geology 

 of Ireland, 1878, p. 84 ; ibid., ed. 1891, p. 112. 



