166 Proceedings. 
cliffs on the coast, it deserves to be separated as a distinct species 
from erodioides. Mr. Gunn says that if more than one species is 
admitted, there must be half a dozen allowed. 
Specimens of the Roofing Slate, near York Town, proposed to 
be worked by Mr. Graves, lay on the table, together with fragments 
of a fibrous quartz, (having much of the structure of wood), which 
presents occasionally in the numberless greenstone veins traversing 
the slate there. 
A series of specimens of carboniferous sandstones and coal— 
_ transition clay-slates—flinty slate in contact with a granitic rock— 
granite of peculiar structure and composition—and greenstone 
obtained during the ascent to the summit of Ben Lomond from 
Kingston, were placed before the meeting by Mr. Milligan, who 
stated that he found sandstones and coal beds (both anthracitie and 
bituminous), close under the vertical escarpment of greenstone, at an 
elevation of 3500 feet, and that he was able distinctly to observe, 
and follow for some space, the line of junction of the erupted trap 
rock and the stratified masses, from which it appeared that the 
edges of the latter, while yet unconsolidated and plastic, had been 
upturned by the igneous matter, and that the immense plateau 
of Ben Lomond is therefore of an age posterior to that of the 
deposition of the coal; that this, with its associated shales and 
sandstones, has been deposited here, as at the Schouten Island 
and Douglas River, over granitic rock, and upon the highly- 
inclined edges of the transition slates, which, together with the 
granite itself, appear to have been upheaved by the projection of 
greenstone and basalt through the whole; and that at the time of 
such stupendous volcanic action, the highest peaks of land of the 
present day lay under water—a fact otherwise sufficiently proved by 
the character of the erupted rock and the evidences of diluvial action 
obvious on our highest table lands. Mr. Milligan took with him an 
Aneroid barometer, which fell from the time of leaving Penguite, 
near Launceston, Thursday, 4th December, to that of attaining the 
table land of Ben Lomond, on the 7th, 4°650 inches, during which 
interval there had been a natural depression of full half an inch in 
the mercurial barometer, near the sea-level. Through accident the 
instrument was not tried on the culminating points of the mountain ; 
but there appears no reason to doubt its continuing to indicate there 
with the same fidelity which marked its action during the ascent. 
