38 



GEOLOGY OF WEST HILL, 



natives avoided us as much as possible, and shortly 

 disappeared altogether from the neighbourhood. 



The seaward cliff of West Hill, and apparently 

 the mass of the hill itself, is composed of a very fine 

 grained trap or basalt, with small crystals of feld- 

 spar, only visible with a lens. The rock is 

 split, by innumerable joints and veins crossing at all 

 angles, into masses of all shapes and sizes. In a few 

 places were traces of nodular concretions, and in 

 others the rock split into flags. On the north side 

 of the point, within the bay, another kind of rock 

 shewed itself, forming low disconnected cliffs at the 

 edge of the flat land beneath the hill. This was a 

 rather soft, dull, earthy sandstone, generally fine- 

 grained, but sometimes containing small quartz 

 pebbles. Its colours were brick red and white, the 

 red appearing generally in irregular blotches, or 

 sometimes looking like nodular concretions. These 

 blotches were sometimes arranged in lines, and if 

 they marked the stratification, it in one place dipped 

 west at 15°. There was no lamination visible, nor 

 any clear lines of bedding in this rock ; but in one 

 place it was capped by a dark brown sandstone, 

 which was very distinctly bedded, and resembled 

 some parts of the magnesian limestone near Not- 

 tingham, in external appearance, having similar 

 small thick lumps and plates. This was in a hori- 

 zontal position : neither of them contained any or- 

 ganic remains, so far as I could discover. 



March 13. — Weighed and ran to the northward, 



