548 proceedings or the geoiogical society. [June 25, 



and waste, not of subterranean movements or fracture. The cliff- 

 sections demonstrate that the hills also are carved; and vertical sea- 

 cliffs prove that the sea does not carve rounded hills. In islands a 

 few miles square there are no streams to account for large rounded 

 hollows a mile wide and a mile long. As glacial marks are in the 

 hollows, they must have been filled with ice ; hut in the Hebrides 

 the ice appears to have come from the direction of Greenland, at 

 same late time. Questions are : — What kind of ice was it? overwhat 

 area did it ever extend ? and what work did it do ? How came 

 these hills and hollows to be carved into their present rounded 

 forms ? 



6. On the Older Tertiary Formations of the West-Indian Islands. 

 By P. Martin Duncan, M.B. Lond., V.P.G.S., F.B.S. &c, Pro- 

 fessor of Geology in King's College, London, &c. 



[Plates XIX.-XXH.] 



In 1867 I believed that I had concluded the examination of all the 

 collections of fossil corals from the West-Indian Islands which were 

 available, and I was not aware that any others were likely to be 

 formed. Therefore in a communication to this Society, which was 

 published in the Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. vol. xxiv. p. 9, after having 

 been read Dec. 4, 1867, I summarized the results of some years' 

 labour on the subject. 



In the winter of 1868-1869, Mr. P. T. Cleve, a Swedish mineralo- 

 gist and geologist, undertook a geological investigation of the North- 

 eastern West-Indian archipelago. He visited the Virgin Islands, 

 St. Bartholomew, Anguilla, St. Martin, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. 

 Kitts, and spent a short time in Puerto Kico. After making col- 

 lections of minerals and fossils, he returned home, and communi- 

 cated a paper on the geology of the North-eastern West-Indian 

 Islands to the Eoyal Swedish Academy on November 23, 1870. 



This communication consists of the descriptive geology and mine- 

 ralogy of the islands, with a few notices of the fossil forms. The 

 palaeontology of the more important islands remained untouched; and 

 early in the year 1873 Mr. Cleve asked me to help him in the matter. 



Some weeks since I received a great number of fossil corals, which 

 had been collected with care, and which belong to the University 

 of Upsala and to the collector. 



A cursory examination of the great collection was sufficient to 

 prove its importance ; for it contained abundant evidence of the 

 former existence of a grand reef- area in the Northern Caribbean 

 Sea, prior to the Miocene, and after the Cretaceous period. 



The study of the specimens has enabled me to fill up the hiatus 

 in the history of the old reefs of the Caribbean, which was rendered 

 apparent by the publication by Mr. Wall and myself, in our com- 

 munication on the geology of Jamaica, of the traces of a coralliferous 

 Eocene series. 



The specimens obtained by Mr. Wall from the conglomerate series 



