COASTS VISITED BY THE ARCTIC EXPEDITION. 637 



the Vienna 'Transactions' contained a memoir relating to the 

 Austrian expedition, in which, he thought, it was shown that 

 passage-beds existed between the Carboniferous and Permian, in 

 which case we should hardly be justified in drawing between them 

 quite so hard a line as Mr. Etheridge had done. 



Sir Leopold M'Clintock said that other expeditions had met with 

 great difficulties in collecting specimens, and that he had himself 

 been obliged to leave behind him a collection of fossils, which was 

 still probably lying as he left it, carefully packed on his sledge. 

 Another collection went to the bottom in the ship ; and generally he 

 had been obliged to content himself with bringing the very smallest 

 specimens, in fact such as could be carried in the waistcoat pocket. 

 The same difficulties would affect all Polar expeditions alike, so that 

 there were good excuses for the officers of former expeditions if they 

 did not bring back large collections ; and, further, it must be borne in 

 mind that most of them were sent out only for search-purposes, 

 with which the collecting of natural-history specimens was, to a 

 great extent, incompatible. 



Dr. Rae said that the coasts he had passed over were unf ossi- 

 ferous, but that he had been fortunate enough to bring home such 

 geological specimens as he had collected. He inquired whether the 

 officers of the recent expedition had noticed a phenomenon which he 

 had observed at his winter quarters. The tide here rose and fell 8 

 or 10 feet, and boulders lying even below low-water mark, or pebbles 

 from the beach, got frozen early in the winter into the ice formed, 

 and as the mass increased became imbedded in it, until when the 

 thawing of the ice commenced in the spring they made their appear- 

 ance on the upper surface. 



Prof. Ramsay said that it was difficult to discuss papers covering 

 so many subjects. With regard to Mr. Etheridge's suggestion that 

 there had been deep fjords in Silurian times, he stated that he felt 

 doubtful, as all such fjords now in existence are connected with ice- 

 action and associated with boulders, which do not appear to be pre- 

 sent in the deposits. He thought, also, that the presence of Bra- 

 chiopoda could not be taken to prove deep water. 



Dr. Gwtn Jeffreys remarked that the living Brachiopoda had a 

 very wide range in depth — some, such as Terebratulina, being found 

 down to great depths ; whilst others, such as RhyneJionella, were 

 shallow-water forms. Some of the fossils seemed to him to show 

 signs of being southern forms. The Chalk had been mistaken for a 

 deep-water formation, which showed how difficult it was to decide 

 on depth by fossils. 



The Duke oe Argyll inquired how deep the ice-cap on the main- 

 land of Greenland was, not in the valleys, but on the hills or table- 

 lands, where it was strictly an ice- cap. If it was no more than 

 some 50 feet it was surely inadequate to produce the phenomena 

 attributed to the action of similar sheets of ice. 



Rev. J. P. Blake called attention to the way in which certain 

 genera, such as Bronteus and Zaphrentis, had been said to occur on 

 horizons different from those of which they are usually regarded as 



