54 GEOLOGICAL MEMOIRS, 



the coal forms the lowest bed in the island, and all the strata with 

 petrifactions, to the very summit of Mount Misery, lie above it. 

 This is very different from those deposits of coal which are wrought 

 in Germany, Belgium, France, in by far the larger pottion of England, 

 and in vastly extended deposits in the Western States of North Ame- 

 rica, for these are never covered anew with beds containing marine 

 shells belonging to this formation. The lower coal-seams on the 

 Donetz and in the government of Kaluga are scarcely, in the Waldai 

 district not at all, worthy of being wrought. They are mere thin dis- 

 continuous layers, yet they have the same composition with the thick 

 beds of coal that lie above them. Stigmaria ficoides fills the sand- 

 stone below ; fronds of Pecopte7'is and Neuropteris the upper part of 

 the coal. Even in the beds of Bear Island M. Keilhau found a 

 beautiful, perhaps a new, species of Pecopteris^ which is preserved in 

 the Christiana collection. In the highest beds above it, at 7 in the 

 section (fig. 2), the Productus giganteus is common, sometimes two 

 inches in diameter ; besides the P.punctatus of equal size ; and lastly 

 the P. striatusy characteristic of the Productus limestone of the coal 

 formation. These were even seen in the blocks which have fallen 

 down from the summit of Mount Misery, along with the Productus 

 plicatilis and with the new beautiful Spirifer Keilhavii. Calamopora 

 polymorpha and Fenestella antiqua also occurred among these blocks, 

 together with a striated Pecten with an angle of 60° at the hinge, 

 and many finely striated fragments of Crinoidea with a round open- 

 ing, but whose true nature could not be well determined without the 

 head (Krone). All these petrifactions, and even the coal, are again 

 found in Spitzbergen, and, it is probable, in exactly the same posi- 

 tion. Keilhau himself found Productus giganteus on the south cape 

 of Spitzbergen; and in 1839 the French naturalists observed the 

 same species of Productus and Spirifer in Bell Sound, in latitude 78°. 

 They are figured in the large Atlas (Livrais. xxvi.) to * Gaimard's 

 Polar Expedition.' And from still deeper-situated beds, whale-fishers 

 brought sixty tons of coal from Isfiord to Hammerfest. Calamites, 

 Sigillariae, even Lepidodendron, are not uncommon in the same beds 

 (Robert, Bull, de la Soc. Geol. xiii.). 



According to these observations Bear Island forms the most 

 southern point where this remarkable formation of carboniferous 

 Productus beds occurs ; for in the whole Scandinavian peninsula, 

 which lies opposite to it on the south, not a trace of it has yet been 

 discovered. But on the other hand it has been found by M. von 

 Baer in Nova Zembla, and by Count Keyserling even on the shores 

 of the icy ocean near Mezen and eastwards from the mouth of the 

 Petschora. But when we follow, on the most complete of all the 

 geognostic maps of Russia— on that which accompanies Murchison*s 

 great work on that country, and for which we are in great part in- 

 debted to his distinguished acuteness of talent for combination— the 

 distribution of the Productus limestone, it immediately strikes the 

 eye how it surrounds, in a great semicircle, the granite and gneiss 

 mountains of Finland. This semicircle is now evidently continued 

 on the northern side through Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen, and Bear 



