6 Salter—Budleigh Salterton Pebble-Bed. 
rightful position, and secures its hold of the public. And 
when this is done, we find it is no stranger after all,—that 
some twenty or thirty feet of shales, for instance, packed in with 
the base of our Lias, are really the representative of some great 
Alpine Limestones, which range from the Tyrol to the sources 
of the Ganges, and which are only not as important as the 
Dudley Limestone because they have been as yet less studied 
and described. ‘The history of the Lower Lias and Upper 
New Red Sandstone for the last fifteen or twenty years may 
well make us believe, that, ‘when the geology of a country is 
done, that is the time to begin it.’ The ‘Quebec group’ in North 
America is another example of the same kind. 
And so, as we do not know the real value of any new fact, 
we gladly welcome all; and, while we look with respect on com- 
plete monographs, systems of mountain-structure, and theories 
of internal heat, we feel no misgiving about small additions to 
our accepted data: they are always welcome, like the faces of 
fresh children at a feast; ‘the more the merrier.’ 
Pebble-bed in the New Red Sandstone at Budleigh Salterton : 
the Derivation of the Pebbles from Silurian Strata, and the 
Geographical Conditions under which the Pebble-bed was formed. 
—For half a century and more the roadways in the South of 
Devon have been mended largely from the hard round pebbles 
of the shore under Budleigh Salterton, and from the conglo- 
merate seen there in the cliff. A bed, one hundred feet thick, of 
quartzose pebbles, was not a thing to be neglected in a country 
of slate and marl, of watery atmosphere, and deep miry ways. 
Iixeter has found these pebbles admirably suited to her wants ; 
and the men who break them have learned the value of the 
‘ cockles’ and ‘ butterflies’ within. It is only lately, however, 
that the contents have been critically examined; Mr. W. 
Vicary, of Exeter, leading the way, i a memoir, about to be 
published by the Geological Society, descriptive of the range 
and extent of the pebble-bed. Some thirty species of fossils 
have been already detected; all of them, without exception, 
being new to British geology, 
I need not go into details, which will be given by Mr. Vicary 
and myself in the forthcoming No. of the Geological Journal ; 
but I would call attention to the fact, that here, in a limited 
range of country, a single bed, not hitherto explored, has been 
found to contain a wholly new group of fossils—a fauna new 
to Britain, and of which we only find the parallel by crossing 
to the shores of France. It may be the Caradoc Sandstone 
under a new aspect; it may possibly represent an upper por- 
