1856.] PLANT -^UPPER KEUPER SANDSTONE. 371 



Fig. 1 . — Section of the Keuper Sandstone on the North-east side of 

 the Railway ^cutting at Shoulder of Mutton Hill, near Leicester. 



3. Drift, with boulders of Syenite, &c. : 8 to 10 feet thick. 

 2. Soft white sandstone, " Middle beds : " 14 to 1 6 feet. 

 *. Black carbonaceous band, with supposed AI^cb. 



1 . Thin marly sandstones, ' ' Bottom beds : ' ' exposed to the depth of about 2 feet. 

 Average dip about 5° to the South. 



This shows the middle member from 14 to 16 feet thick. It con- 

 tains numerous fragments of pure coal, no doubt from the Ashby 

 field. On the top are alluvial deposits, containing remains of Deer 

 and Ox, with nuts, leaves, and vegetable debris ; and Drift-clay with 

 granitic boulders and detached and worn fossils from the Oolitic, 

 Liassic, and Carboniferous formations. Where the upper surface of 

 the thick soft beds is exposed by the removal of the drift, it is found 

 to be very irregular and grooved, and is much harder than the mass 

 of the beds (which can be rubbed into sand with the fingers), and 

 seems to contain lime, which has agglutinated the particles of silex 

 strongly together, — forming, in fact, a kind of hard skin, thus pre- 

 serving the soft sandstone below. The upper member I consider to 

 have been here entirely denuded ; and its debris has assisted in form- 

 ing the numerous sand-beds found so abundantly along the river- 

 valley. The accompanying section (fig. 2, p. 372) from the Red Clay, 

 on the west, to the Lias, on the east, will serve to illustrate this. 



In support of this view, I may mention that I have taken many 

 specimens of the thin sandy shales containing the Annelid-markings 

 in the sand- and gravel-pits, at a depth of 15 feet from the surface. 

 They are shghtly rounded and worn, and mingled with rolled Oolitic 

 and Liassic fossils. It is obvious that these worn specimens could 

 not have been derived from the lower member of the Keuper Sand- 

 stone ; as that would require the whole of the middle member — the 

 thick beds — to have been swept away. They can only be considered 

 as the remnants of the upper thin sandy shales ; the whole of which 

 appears to have been denuded in this locality ; and, from the scored 

 and worn character of its upper surface where exposed, a great por- 

 tion of the middle member (possibly to the extent of one-half of its 

 original thickness) was probably at the same time removed : in that 

 case, it would bring up the thickness of the middle portion to the 

 standard of the similar member in the Keuper Sandstone of Glou- 

 cestershire and Worcestershire. 



