350 PKOCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [Mar. 7, 



some beds, six or eight feet thick, of pale-grey crystalline limestone. 

 Both beds and cleavage dipped south at 60°. I did not see any fossils, 

 except nests of what I concluded was Favosites joolpnorpha occurring 

 in branching clusters, somewhat as Fenestella does sometimes in the 

 Carboniferous Limestone. It is probably to the growth of this coral 

 that the limestone is due. 



These calcareous bands are described by Sedgwick and Murchison 

 as stretching from Combe-Martin to this place, and then sweeping 

 round Croydon Hill. 



4. JDunster to Lynton. — On the road from Dunster to Lynton, there 

 were no good exposures of rock ; though a detailed search in the beds 

 of the brooks and the cliffs of the sea- shore would doubtless disclose 

 sufficient to enable a hard-working geologist to make out the struc- 

 ture of the country. Speaking generally for Exmoor and the neigh- 

 bourhood, the absence of any good continuous sections is remarkable. 

 High, wide, gently undulating moorlands, covered with short heather, 

 or lower cultivated ground with the same gently undulating surface, 

 are the prevailing features of the country. It is only where the 

 brooks cut deep into the ground on their way to the sea, or where 

 the sea itself has cut back into the land and formed cliffs, that any 

 rock is seen, except in a few small, widely scattered quarries and 

 little road-cuttings. 



The rocks thus shown on Porlock Hill seemed to me not unlike 

 parts of the Irish Old Red Sandstone. 



5. Lynton^ and its neighbourhood. — My very first walk, however, 

 after arriving at Lynton, through the Yalley of Eocks and along the 

 footpath over the cliffs, showed me, to my no small astonishment, 

 that I was again among rocks belonging to the Carboniferous Slate. 



The picturesque crags, so well known to tourists, and the chffs, 

 from the pebble beach on the shore to the top of the hill south of 

 the Yalley of Rocks, ail showed beds which were as familiar to me 

 as Chalk is to an inhabitant of Dover, or Oolite to the dweller in 

 Bath or Cheltenham. The blue-grey slate with little lighter- coloured 

 bands of grit, giving a stripe to the slates, the beds of hard grit 

 often highly calcareous, and crowded with fragments of crinoids, and 

 others more purely siliceous and destitute of organic remains, were 

 aU precisely identical with those which stretch for so many miles 

 along the shores of the bays of the deeply indented coast of Cork, or 

 sweep into the interior of that country round so many anticlinal 

 ridges of Old Red Sandstone. The numerous fragments of Brachio- 

 poda and all the other fossils seemed to my eyes also to be the same 

 as those of Ireland. The colour and aspects of the weathered rocks 

 were also exactly similar. 



As the hiU-tops south of the Yalley of Rocks appeared from my 

 pocket aneroid to rise to a height of 1300 feet above the sea, and the 

 rocks dipped south at 10° or 15°, there could hardly be a less thick- 

 ness seen in them than 1500 feet, and they are so well exposed that 

 almost every bed might be seen somewhere or other (see fig. 11). 



* In almost all geological works this name is spelt Linton. In the place its?lfj 

 however, it is always written Lynton, and the river is called the Lyne. 



