PROCEEDINGS 
or 
THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF LONDON. 
Vor. III. 1839. No. 63. 
April 10.—John Manning Needham, Esq., Chiswell Street ; 
Samuel Wright Fearn, Esq., St. Peter’s, Derby; Barratt Edward 
Lampet, Esq., B.A., of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Haver- 
stock Hill, Hampstead; and John Laurence, Esq., High Street, 
Leicester; were elected Fellows of this Society. 
A paper was read, “‘ On as much of the Transition or Grauwacke 
system as is exposed in the counties of Somerset, Devon, and Corn- 
wall,” by the Rev. David Williams, F.G.S. 
The author commences by stating, that his views of the general 
structure and arrangement of the country are original and independ- 
ent, but that he does not in the least impugn the originality of the 
observations and inferences of other geologists. He mentions, that 
in a communication read before the British Association at Dublin 
(1835), he used the following expression in remarking on the 
broad outline of the structure of Devonshire with respect to the 
relative position of the strata containing plants and culm: “ the 
clay slate (without the intervention of gneiss or mica-slate) dips 
away from the granite of Lundy on the one hand, and from the 
granite of Dartmoor towards it on the other;” and that in a paper 
sent to the Meeting of the British Association at Bristol (1836), but 
received too late to be read, was inserted this passage: “‘ the same 
beds bemg brought up to the surface at either extremity” (Exmoor 
and the north of Cornwall) ‘‘ contain in their great intermediate 
trough all the strangely contorted rocks and carbonaceous shales 
we there witness.” 
Mr. Williams then alludes to an error which he made in the paper 
read at Dublin, by considering the mineral axis of Dartmoor to be 
composed of the strata he calls the ‘‘ Morte Slates,” but which 
he corrected in a paper read at Liverpool (1837); he notices also 
another error which he had made in supposing that the same beds 
(the Morte slates) were brought up among the granite of Dartmoor, 
-and which he did not discover till the spring and summer of 1838, 
when he perceived that ‘the two superior members of the North 
Devon group, Nos. 7. and 8. are brought up in the south in pre- 
cisely the same order and relation in which they descend on the 
north,” having previously overlooked this natural simplicity of 
arrangement. 
VOL. III. L 
