334 PROF. J. B. HARRISON ON [Aug. I907,. 



Indian species. I should not have been surprised, taking into account both its 

 condition of preservation and the absolute identity of all the points shown with 

 recent forms, if your specimen had been obtained from a living reef. The 

 species is found in the newer reefs of Guadeloupe, but not in the old white 

 limestone there or in the Oligocene beds of Antigua. 



'The Orbicella acropora is also a common living West-Indian species. It 

 has been recorded fossil from Antigua ; for I accepted it as occurring in the 

 Antigua Marls (Quart. Journ. Greol. Soc. vol. li, 1895, p. 272) on the evidence 

 of Duncan, who recorded the occurrence of his species Astrcea barbade?isis in 

 Antigua ; but as he admitted that his Antigua record was based on a very 

 worn specimen, I do not think that the evidence of its occurrence in Antigua is 

 of any value. 



' The two corals which you sent me certainly show no evidence of any greater 

 age than the Pleistocene.' 



This evidence, I submit, effectually disposes of the only proof of 

 any weight that Prof. Spencer has offered to show that part of the 

 Barbados coral-rock succession is of Oligocene age. 



AtChelston, about a mile to the south-east of the Cathedral, 

 are some very large quarries on the face of the lowest escarpment, 

 in which sections are exposed for about 150 yards, the faces of the 

 quarries being in places from 40 to 60 feet in depth. The beds 

 consist principally of the common, recent, shallow-water, branching 

 corals of the genus Porites, lying in general confusion in coral-rock 

 debris. The bedding seen in the quarries is ill-defined, in places 

 the dip is at low angles of from 1° to 3° towards the north, in others 

 at similar angles in a southerly direction. It was on the slopes of 

 this escarpment, and in the Chelston quarries, that the Eight Eev. 

 Bishop Mitchinson collected many of the numerous varieties of 

 mollusca from which the recent age of the lower raised coral-rocks 

 has been deduced. 



A large quarry in similar rock is being worked at Codrington, 

 2 miles north of Bridgetown. 



I may here place on record the fact that, in the district inside the 

 100-foot contour-line to the north-east of Bridgetown, the limestones 

 are in places very thin, as, for instance, near the mouth of the Belle 

 gully close to the extension of the Bank-Hall road to Welches, and 

 in the bottom of the Waterford gully, north of the estate-works, 

 where there are signs of the existence of small inliers of the Oceanic 

 Beds. 



In the numerous road-cuttings and quarries which I examined to 

 the north and north-east of Bridgetown I found no evidence of high 

 dips, the beds either being generally almost horizontal, or showing 

 current-bedding on a small scale. Nor could I detect any signs 

 of true unconformity between the lowest beds and the upper beds 

 which Prof. Spencer has admitted to be recent. 



Where the roads from Bridgetown to the higher parts of the 

 island pass through the successive limestone-escarpments, many of 

 the deeper cuttings showed at the time of my visit clean, perfectly 

 fresh surfaces. It is in the cuttings on the faces of the construc- 

 tional escarpments that the beds with abundance of corals, described 



