352 MR. E. W. BINNEY ON CARBONIFEROUS^ PERMIAN, AND 



No doubt the anticlinal axis previously noticed as seen 

 near the Round and the Long Pools in the Esk, might have 

 repeated some of the beds ; but the four beds of breccia 

 appear to me so different in characters, boundary -rocks^ 

 and thicknesses, that I came to the above conclusion. 



In this section the lower soft red sandstone, instead of 

 being a compact mass, lying under the magnesian lime- 

 stone and the breccia or conglomerate, as is generally the 

 case in most of the sections lying to the south, is actually 

 divided into several beds by a bed of magnesian limestone 

 and four different beds of breccia. 



The red shales lying under the last bed of breccia, con- 

 taining Stigmaria rootlets, are considered by me to be the 

 highest coal-measures ever yet noticed in Great Britain. 



Probably the passage of the carboniferous into the over- 

 lying Permian beds is more apparent than real, and 

 the bed of breccia doubtless shows a period of disturb- 

 ance ; but in the whole course of my observations, extending 

 over 30 years, I must say that I have never seen anything 

 before which to me appeared so nearly to prove the passage 

 of the one into the other as this section does. 



On continuing the section from near the bridge up the 

 river, red and purple shales, with thin beds of gritstone, 

 are seen for 200 yards to a bed of red and purple- 

 coloured sandstone exposed at Knotty Holm*, df about 



boundary of the New Eed Sandstone, says, " It passes to the east of Brampton, 

 after which it ranges in a sinuous line, very much covered by alluvial detritus, 

 but on the whole nearly due north, till it crosses the Liddel and enters Scot- 

 land ; then it is deflected nearly to the west, and crosses the Esk just above 

 Canobie Bridge." 



* Prof. Harkness, in a paper pubHshed on the New Red Sandstone of the 

 southern portion of the Valley of the Nith, in speaking of what he calls " the 

 great Triassic formation," says, " The eastern limit of the New Red Sandstone 

 in Dimifriesshire is in the parish of Canobie, where it is seen in the bed of 

 the River Esk, at Canobie Bridge. Its northern extremity in this parish is 

 met with a little higher up the river, at a place called Knotty Holm, near to 

 which the Canobie coal-field commences." (Quarterly Journal of the Geo- 

 logical Society for November 1850, vol. vi. p. 389.) 



