110 MR. E. W. BINNEY ON THE PERMIAN AND 



On the Hard and Soft Sandstones of the KnowsUy, 

 Whiston, St. Helen's, and Manchester Districts. 



No doubt it is a very difficult matter to determine with 

 absolute certainty where the Trias strata end and the Per- 

 mian begin when there are no organic remains to guide 

 us^ and we have to trust to a bed of red marl or a deposit 

 of red sandstone. In my several memoirs published on 

 this subject, so far as South Lancashire was concerned, 

 the red marls and limestones of Newtown and Bedford are 

 assumed to be the uppermost Permian deposits found. It 

 is quite true, as stated in my third memoir, " Some of the 

 sections near Manchester, especially that seen in the valley 

 of the Irk, in Cheetham and Newtown, would apparently 

 show that the red marls containing limestones and fossils 

 of the genera Bakevellia, Schizodus, &c,, passed into the 

 overlying Trias /^ but as a whole it was assumed from 

 other facts that the red sandstone of the Trias was uncon- 

 formable to the underlying permian beds. In a paper 

 published by Sir U. I. Murchison and Professor Harkness, 

 printed in the ^Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society' 

 for May 1864, as well as in my last memoir, the thick 

 red sandstones of St. Bees are described as Permian and 

 not as Trias, and were traced down, as Professor Sedgwick 

 had previously followed them, into Furness, near Haw- 

 coat and Barrow. Anyone who sees the red sandstones, 

 much used for building purposes at Shawk, Maryport, and 

 St. Bees, and compares them with that at Hawcoat, wUl 

 not be able to distinguish the one from the others. It is 

 only from their physical characters that we can compare 

 these sandstones ; for up to this time, so far as my know- 

 ledge extends, no organic remains have been met with in 

 them. Now, this is bringing a Permian red sandstone 

 above the Newtown and Bedford red marls and limestones, 

 and introduces, for the first time, an Upper Permian sand- 



