3i 



of which many hundreds of thousands have already been sent out 

 from Belleek, and are daily in process of manufacture. 



On Thursday evening, 26th January, the following communi- 

 cation was read, being the last received by any society from the 

 fruitful pen of the late Mr. Gr. V. Dr Noyer : — 



" To the Secretary of the Belfast Naturalists' Field Club. 



" Dear Sir, — In the Fifth Annual Report of the Belfast Natu- 

 ralists' Field Club, 1867-68, the paper entitled ' A Run through 

 Galway with a Yasculum,' by Mr. S. A. Stewart, needs a few com- 

 ments, in a geological point of view, and I venture to make them, 

 in the simple desire of affording information to a labourer in the 

 field of science like myself. 



" The old Tertiary land, which extended from what is now Ire- 

 land to what is now the Northern portion of Spain, and which also 

 connected what is now England with the present coast of France 

 and Germany, was not depressed beneath the sea, but was denuded, 

 or carried away by the sea action. Thus Ireland and England be- 

 came isolated, and thus there was left on them the relics of a Flora 

 and a Fauna whose centres of creation were on the Continent of 

 Europe, and who radiated as far as what is new the central portion 

 of Ireland, and the Southern portion of what is now England, be- 

 fore this disruption by denudation took place. We have no evi- 

 dence of a subsidence of this land, now the area of water occupied 

 by the Irish Channel, the English Channel, and the Bay of Biscay, 

 but we have clear evidence in the Drift deposits along our coasts, 

 known to geologists as the Boulder Clay, or Ice Drift. But this 

 mass of detrital matter, formed of clays and gravels with erratic 

 boulders, which are invariably ice-scratched, once covered the space 

 now occupied by our widest bays, like the Bay of Dublin, and the 

 channel between England and France. Since this Boulder Clay 

 has been swept away, very much of the solid rock on which it 

 originally lay has also been denuded, as we see clear evidence in 



