346 MR. E. W. BINNEY ON CARBONIFEROUS, PERMIAN, AND 



shown that a great thickness of unprofitable coal-measures 

 had to be traversed before the profitable coal-field at Com- 

 mon could be reached in that district, some 550 yards. 



The Canobie section exposes far more coal-measures 

 above the Spirorbis limestone than the one at Balloch- 

 moyle — at least 200 yards ; and it shows a passage of Car- 

 boniferous into Permian beds, so far as the eye can de- 

 tect, better than any that has hitherto come under my 

 observation. The strata of these two formations in the 

 bank of the river above the bridge at Canobie, from the 

 lowest bed of breccia into the underlying clays and 

 shales, are most difficult, if not impossible, to separate 

 from the red shales and sandstones seen between that 

 point and the bridge there. 



The district about Canobie, Penton, and Longtown has 

 been described at length by Mr. Edmund Gibsone, in an 

 elaborate and well-illustrated memoir, printed in the 'Trans- 

 actions of the North of England Institute of Mining En- 

 gineers ^^. In the Penton Linns section, the author de- 

 scribes the mountain-limestone seams of coal; in the Penton 

 Eailway section, the millstone-grit series ; and in the Can- 

 obie coal-field, the middle series ; and he shows a fault on 

 the south of the latter coal-field, which throws the coal- 

 measures down, and brings in the Permian strata. All the 

 red measures south of this fault Mr. Gibsone appears to 

 consider Permian, and the fault which brings them in he 

 calls the Great Permian fault. After examining these red 

 measures, I have come to the conclusion that, although a 

 portion of them are Permian strata, as Mr. Gibsone describes 

 them to be, a great part of them are unquestionably upper 

 coal-measures. The profitable Canobie coal-field, like the 

 Common coal-field in Ayrshire, belongs to the middle or 



* "A Geological Paper on the Border Districts of Dumfriessliire, Cum- 

 berland, and part of Eoxburghshire, including tlie Coal Formation of Can- 

 obie, &c.," by Edmund Gibsone, vol. xi. p. 65. 



