Vol. 6^.~] INLTEB IN THE EASTEEN MENDIPS. 239 



as he saw it, did not present the characters of a deposit which had 

 been sorted or distributed by water. It was true that the included 

 lumps were well worn, so that the material as seen from a few yards' 

 distance resembled pebble-gravel, but the absence of stratification 

 and the character of the matrix both indicated a volcanic origin. 

 Some of the ashes, on the other hand, shown to him by the Author 

 were not only well stratified, but teemed with fossils. 



The comparison with Gower was most instructive. In both cases 

 it appeared that the Upper had overlapped the Lower Old Red 

 Sandstone. Presumably the Lower Old Red Sandstone had thinned 

 away on the flanks of eminences in the platform on which the red 

 rocks were laid down; but there did not appear any reason why post- 

 Carboniferous anticlines, such as those of the Mendips and Grower, 

 should coincide in position with such eminences. At any rate, the 

 existence of the overlap would assist in the exact separation of 

 the Upper from the Lower Old Red Sandstone, which was attended 

 with great difficulty in the South-West of England and Wales. 



The paper furnished a notable increase to our knowledge of an 

 interesting region. 



The Rev. H. H. Win wood said that, since Charles Moore's dis- 

 covery in 1866 of the past traces of igneous action on the Mendips, 

 recent quarrying at Moon's Hill, Sunnyhill, and elsewhere had 

 enabled the Author to bring before the Society the result of his 

 important investigations. If the igneous series now described was 

 contemporaneous with the Silurian, as seemed fairly shown by the 

 fossils, and that farther west had been accepted as contemporaneous 

 with the Old Red Sandstone, then there must have been two out- 

 bursts separated by a long lapse of time. With reference to the 

 remarkable section of ' ashy conglomerate ' at the New Quarry, 

 the speaker was pleased to find that the suggestion had been made 

 that the ' neck ' might be sought for in that direction : this 

 coincided with the view that he had himself entertained. Might 

 not the rounded and subangular masses of trap have been caused 

 by a submarine outburst and subsequent rolling ? The Mendip 

 area had been full of surprises, as the Chairman had remarked. 

 It remained for such careful and accurate observers as the Author 

 to reveal still more surprises, and there was yet much work to be 

 done by the younger geologists in that district. 



Prof. Sollas felt grateful to the Author for removing a grievance 

 which he, in common with all students of the locality, felt that 

 they had against the Mendips, since these mountains seemed to 

 promise, fold after fold, to bring Silurian to the surface, without 

 actually doing so. Now they learnt that, in its very last fold 

 before this range plunged out of sight beneath the sediments to the 

 east, the promised Silurian had appeared. If the determinations of 

 the palaeontologists as to the horizon of the Silurian could be 

 accepted, general conclusions of an interesting nature followed : 

 for both Gower and the Mendips lay on the northern boundary of 

 the Armorican chain, and the absence in these regions of the 

 higher members of the Silurian suggested that a folding, which 

 as the antithesis of posthumous, might be spoken of as prophetic, 

 had already marked this line of weakness. The Tortworth un- 



