ANTARCTIC ADVENTURE AND RESEARCH 



also by my party near Mount Suess (latitude jy'^ S.). 

 Dr. Gould has reported carbonaceous shales near the 

 foot of Liv Glacier. The Mount Suess seams appear 

 to occur with dark shales near the base of the sand- 

 stones. It is a hard bright coal with a large amount 

 of ash. Probably it has been baked by the dolerite 

 sills. The Beardmore coal, however, contains 14.5 

 per cent of volatile constituents and has not been 

 baked to the same extent. Here Frank Wild recorded 

 three hundred feet of coal measures containing seven 

 seams of coal, from one foot up to seven feet in 

 thickness. Fossil w^ood was obtained in the vicinity in 

 1908, which appears to belong to a gymnospermous 

 plant, but much finer specimens of fossils were brought 

 back by Dr. Wilson in 19 12, and found near his body. 

 The fish remains collected by Frank Debenham and 

 the writer on the moraine below Mount Suess in De- 

 cember, 191 1, consist of dermal plates and scales. 

 They are all isolated and scattered, showing that the 

 fishes were disintegrated before burial, but the frag- 

 ments are beautifully preserved, and in transparent 

 sections their histological structure is perfectly ob- 

 servable. The plates appear as whitish or bluish-gray 

 patches on the gray rock, and were so polished in some 

 cases that the writer was reminded of the elytrse of 

 beetles. Woodward states that Ostracoderms, Elas- 

 mohranchs , Teleostomi and Dipnoi are all represented. 

 One specimen, Bothriolepis, is a common Upper De- 

 vonian fossil both in Europe and North America. (See 

 inset in Figure 6.) 



98 



