38 Fingal and East Coast. 



altitude ; and that this has finally been effected by a long 

 continuance of upheavements, or by a gradual and close 

 succession of elevations, causing a proportionably slow re- 

 tirement of waters, and an equally protracted process of 

 degradation of strata, by which the hardest rocks, though 

 occasionally disrupted and carried off in masses into the 

 vortex beneath, and transported by accumulated forces 

 from a thousand sources far occasionally from their original 

 situation, have yet ordinarily been minutely broken up, and 

 worn away by continued currents, and the ceaseless set of 

 tides, to be swept down by the same means, in the shape 

 only of mud, of sand, fine gravel, or of larger boulders, 

 according to their nature and position. 



The occurrence at frequent intervals of a talus of sand 

 and of fine gravel, which I have before noticed, and also 

 of deep and extensive deposits of gravel, composed of 

 boulders and rounded pebbles of almost every size and 

 description, in the lower parts of the valley of the South 

 Esk, have a strong bearing on the question of slow 

 elevation. 



The crinoidal or spiriferous limestone occurs at various 

 elevations in the course of the South Esk and Break-o'- 

 day valleys. At several points along the range of hills 

 which skirt the right of the road from Avoca to Fingal, 

 and about two miles west from the locality last mentioned, 

 it crops out at elevations of 500 to 800 feet, resting upon 

 perpendicular cliffs, 100 feet in height, composed of clayey 

 sandstone, fine fossiliferous conglomerate, compact and 

 schistose clay, &c. ; afterwhich the series stretches upwards 

 through more than 100 feet of shales and slaty clays, 

 merging at length in thick beds of carboniferous sand- 

 stone, which are in turn overlaid by massive greenstone 

 culminating in hills of 1500 to 1800 feet in elevation. 

 The limestone occurs near the township of Fingal, a 

 little to the southward, only a little above the level of 



