Fingal and East Coast. 65 



few dry sticks, and within half an hour there was a mass 

 of fire and flame fit to roast an ox. 



The coal is of a deep black colour : its structure is 

 cubical ; but a few inches near the bottom of the 

 seam incline to slaty, with a flat conchoidal fracture. 

 Its lustre is bright, rich, and splendent, like that of 

 resin or jet, and it is easily frangible: it ignites readily, 

 fuses to some extent, gives out dense volumes of black 

 smoke, and burns in the mass with a wild ruddy flame 

 and strong glare, yielding^ in detached pieces exposed to 

 red heat, long piping jets of bright white flame. 



There is a well-defined line of demarcation along 

 the line of fault, which nearly agrees with the direction 

 of the dip ; and the newer sandstone is seen side by side 

 with the coal itself, instead of resting, as it ordinarily 

 does, upon intervening sandstones and shales. 



About a quarter of a mile further up the river this 

 coal-seam is again thrown up, exposing a breast full 8 

 feet thick, obliquely traversing the bed of the river, 

 and dipping to the north at the rate of 1 in 13. 



As before, the seam rests upon a bed of schistose clay, 

 and is covered with a compact bed of greyish-white 

 sandstone. The seam contains three thin layers of clay ; 

 altogether, less than six inches for rejection. 



The compact greyish-white sandstone is almost imme- 

 diately, and not quite conformably, overlaid by undulating 

 beds of a brownish-yellow sandstone, in which are 

 enclosed detached masses of bituminous coal, and nodules 

 of a pyritous clay ironstone. Between the grey and 

 brownish sandstones there is an irregular seam of the 

 same clay ironstone, a few inches thick. 



The sandstone rises into cliffs of 100 and 150 feet per- 

 pendicular on either side : it is traversed in lines from 

 north west to south east, within the next mile and a half, 

 by two or three dikes of basalt, from a few inches to as 



