1847.] JAMES ON A SECTION AT PORTSMOUTH. 249 



plants, among which were Pecopteris Australis, a Sphenopteris and 

 a Zeugophyllites. 



There are other places in Tasmania where coal is worked, but they 

 are chiefly detached and isolated spots separated by greenstone ridges 

 one from the other. I was not able to visit any other of these loca- 

 lities, but I should fear that the beds of coal in Tasmania are com- 

 paratively insignificant in an economic point of view, that the true 

 coal-measures of the country have no great thickness, and that the 

 seams of coal contained in them are but partial, thickening and thin- 

 ning out perhaps along the same horizontal lines, and thus forming 

 limited cakes rather than regular and persistent beds. 



C. East Coast of Tasmania. 



Rocks of the palaeozoic formation, chiefly sandstones, are found at 

 various points of the eastern coast, but greatly broken and obscured 

 by the usual greenstone ranges and local exhibitions of other trap 

 rocks. In Maria Island are limestone quarries which I did not visit, 

 but from which I procured fossils, among which were some of the 

 large Pachydomi, of precisely the same species as those from Wol- 

 longong in New South Wales. 



At Spring Vale, about ten miles above Great Swan Port, is a patch 

 of palaeozoic rocks, not more than a mile or two in extent, forming a 

 low gently undulating ground surrounded by hills of igneous rock. 

 No section is exhibited, but blocks of the rock protrude through the 

 soil. It is a fine compact quartz rock, charged with the usual fossils 

 of the formation in great abundance. The rock reminded me strongly 

 of the quartz rock of the Lickey Hill. The fossils of this locality 

 were — 



Fossils from Spring Vale. 



Fenestella ampla. Spirifer Stokesii. 



Producta rugata ? crassicostatus, sp. nov. 



Spirifer radiatus. three others. 



Darwinii. Stem of a Crinoidal animal. 



Tasmaniensis. 



On a Section exposed hy the excavation at the New Steam Basin, in 

 Portsmouth Dock- Yard. By Capt. James, Royal Engineers, 

 M.R.I.A. F.G.S. &c. 



The principal fact which this section exhibits is one with which 

 every geologist is familiar. Almost every writer who has examined 

 any extent of our sea-coasts has alluded to submarine forests, and 

 pointed to them as a proof of the subsidence of the land within a 

 comparatively recent period, and I should hardly have thought it worth 

 while to present this section to the Geological Society, if it did not 

 exhibit the facts in a much clearer manner than usually occurs. I 

 may however observe, that I have myself seen the remains of forests, 

 not only along the coasts of England in localities which have been 

 described, but also in many places along the coast of Ireland which 

 I believe have not been previously noticed, as in the counties of 



