223 



pyrites, and is thickly studded with transparent crystals of sulphate of 

 lime, but no connexion could be traced between the two deposits, and 

 the sands for five or six feet underlying the clay contain no selenite. 



January 6, 1836. — William Anstice, Esq., of Madeley Wood, 

 Shropshire, was elected a Fellow of this Society. 



A notice on the transportation of rocks by ice, extracted from a 

 letter of Capt. Bayfield, R.N., addressed to Charles Lyell,Esq.,P.G.S., 

 was first read. 



Capt. Bayfield says that both on the lakes of Canada and in the 

 St. Lawrence he has seen fragmentary rocks carried by ice. The St. 

 Lawrence is low in winter, and the loose ice accumulating on the ex- 

 tensive shoals which line each side of the river is frozen into a solid 

 mass, being exposed to a temperature sometimes 30° below zero. 

 The shoals are thickly strewed with boulders, which become entangled 

 in the ice ; and in the spring, when the river rises from the melting 

 of the snow, the packs are floated off, frequently conveying the boul- 

 ders for great distances. It is also well known that stones are car- 

 ried by the ice. Anchors laid down within high-water mark to secure 

 vessels hauled on shore for the winter, are cut out of the ice on the 

 approach of spring, or they would be carried away. In 1834 the 

 Gulnare's bower-anchor, weighing half a ton, was transported some 

 yards by the ice, and so firmly was it fixed, that the force of the 

 moving ice broke a chain cable as large as that of a 10-gun brig, and 

 which had rode the Gulnare during the heaviest gales in the Gulf. 

 The anchor was cut out of the ice or it would have been carried into 

 deep water and lost. 



With respect to rocks being transported by icebergs, Capt. Bayfield's 

 testimony is equally conclusive, as he passed three seasons in the vi- 

 cinity of the Strait of Belleisle. In an iceberg which he examined, 

 boulders, gravel, and stones were thickly imbedded ; and he saw others 

 which owed their dirty colour to the same cause. Some of these 

 immense ice-islands, Capt. Bayfield thinks, had been detached from 

 the coast very far to the northward, perhaps from Baffin's Bay, The 

 northern current brings similar masses in great numbers down the 

 coast of Labrador every year, and they are very frequently carried 

 through the straits, and for several hundred miles to the S.W. up the 

 Gulf of St. Lawrence. 



A paper *' On the syenite veins which traverse mica slate at Good- 

 land clift" and chalk at Torr Eskert, to the south of Fair Head in the 

 county of Antrim," by Richard Griffith, Esq., F.G.S., and P.G.S. of 

 Dublin, was afterwards read. 



The part of Antrim to which this paper refers is situated between 

 Fair Head on the north, and Cushleake mountain on the south. The 

 base, or oldest formation of the district, consists of inchned strata of 

 mica slate passing into gneiss, and containing subordinate beds of 

 hornblende slate and schistose limestone. Upon the mica slate re- 

 pose nearly horizontal and unconformable strata of coal measures, new 

 red sandstone, and chalk ; and the whole of these secondary deposits 



