1866.] JUKES OLD BED SANDSTONE AND DEVONIAN. 347 



Journal, I went at length into the reasons which induced me to 

 identify the beds about Barnstaple, Pilton, Marwood, Braunton, and 

 Baggy Point with the Carboniferous Slate of Cork, and the red beds 

 of Yention in Morte Bay with the top of the Old Eed Sandstone of 

 Cork. 



The greenish and brownish grits, containing large Cucullcece, &c., 

 known as " Marwood Sandstone," are represented in Ireland by 

 similar sandstones with the same fossils as mentioned at pp. 336, 337. 

 These sandstones expand in Bantry Bay into the great mass which 

 there acquired the name of '' Coomhola Grits." I believe, however, 

 that any attempt to separate these beds, either in Devon or Ireland, 

 as a distinct group from the Carboniferous Slate in which they lie, 

 will merely mislead us. Both the sandstones, and the peculiar fossils 

 which they contain, are local occurrences, either, or both of which 

 may be present in, or absent from, the same formation in different 

 districts. I satisfied myself during the excursion in 1861, of which 

 the paper mentioned above gives an account, that the Old Eed Sand- 

 stone which crops up in the south corner of Morte Bay, is continuous 

 into the country at least as far as the moor called Span Head on the 

 Ordnance Map*, a distance of about twenty miles ; and that the 

 Carboniferous Slate continues that far to the south of it. The time 

 at my disposal did not allow me, on that occasion, to do more than 

 take one walk from Barnstaple across to Ilfracombe and back, and 

 what I saw during that traverse merely bewildered me. There 

 was apparently a prevailing dip to the south all across the country, 

 nevertheless the rocks about Ilfracombe were very unlike any that I 

 knew of in the Old Red Sandstone of Ireland, and had a certain resem- 

 blance to parts of the Carboniferous Slate. I^Tot finding any fossils, 

 however, I hesitated to do more than hint at a doubt whether " the 

 Ilfracombe beds were really below the red beds of Morte Bay," and 

 to suggest a suspicion that they " may belong to the Carboniferous 

 Slate rolled in to the north by contortions, and somewhat different 

 lithologically from those farther south " (loc. at. pp. 10 & 11). 



After the meeting of the British Association in Birmingham last 

 year, I hoped I had secured an opportunity of satisfying myself on 

 this point. I had carefully re-read and made an abstract of the paper 

 by Professor Sedgwick and Sir E,. I. Murchison in the fifth volume 

 of this Society's Transactions, and had in consequence dismissed from 

 my mind the suspicion mentioned above, and set out with the full con- 

 viction that the rocks of the north coast, about Lynton and Ilfracombe, 

 could not be in any way the same as those near Barnstaple, and was 

 accordingly prepared to find a series of rocks wholly new to me. 



2, Dulverton. — I made first for Dulverton, some ten miles farther 

 east than any ground I had yet seen. I found, as I expected from 

 the published descriptions f, that the Carboniferous Slate and Old 



* The people of the country give the name of Span Head to another hill two 

 or three miles farther to the east. 



t See especially the fossils mentioned by Phillips as occurring at Brushford, 

 near Dulverton, in his ' Palaeozoic Fossils.' I collected Orthis interlineata in a 

 quarry there. 



2b2 



