28 Dr. Fitton on the Geology of Australia. 



of that rock*. A calcareous compound, apparently of the 

 same kind, has been recently mentioned, as of daily production 

 in Anastasia Island, on the coast of East Florida f; and will 

 probably be found to be of very general occurrence in that 

 quarter of the globe. And Captain Beaufort's account of the 

 pi'ocess by which the gravelly beach is cemented into stone, 

 at Selinti, and several other places on the coast of Karamania, 

 on the north-east of the Mediterranean J, accords with M. Pe- 

 ron's description of the progress from the loose and moveable 

 sands of the dunes to solid masses of rock§. In the island of 

 Rhodes, also, there are hills of pudding-stone, of the same 

 character, considerably elevated above the sea. And Captain 

 W. H. Smyth, the author of Travels in Sicily, and of the Sur- 

 vey of the Mediterranean recently published by the Admiralty, 

 informs me, that he has seen these concretions in Calabria, and 

 on the coasts of the Adriatic ; — but still more remarkably in 

 the narrow strip of recent land, (called the Placca,) which con- 

 nects Leucadia, one of the Ionian Islands, with the continent, 

 and so much resembles a work of art, that it has been consi- 

 dered as a Roman fabric. The stone composing this isthmus 

 is so compact, that the best mill-stones in the Ionian Islands 

 are made from it; but it is in fact nothing more than gravel 

 and sand cemented by calcareous matter, the accretion of 

 which is supposed to be rapidly advancing at the present day. 



The nearest approach to the concreted sand-rock of Aus- 

 tralia, that I have seen, is in the specimens presented by Dr. 

 Daubeny to the Bristol Institution, to accompany his excellent 

 paper on the geology of Sicily ||; which prove that the are- 

 naceous breccia of New Holland is very like that which occu- 

 pies a great part of the coast, almost entirely around that 

 island. Some of Dr. Daubeny's specimens from Monte Ca- 

 logero, above Sciacca, consist of a breccia, containing angular 

 fragments of splintery limestone, united by a cement, com- 

 posed of minute grains of quartzose-sand disseminated in a 

 calcareous paste, resembling precisely that of the breccia of 



* Koenig. Phil. Trans. 1814, p. 107, &c. 



f Bulletin des Sciences Nat. Mars, 1825. 



| Beaufort's " Description of the South Coast of Asia Minor," &c. Se- 

 cond edition. London, 1818: pp. 180 — 184, &c. In the neighbourhood of 

 Adalia, the deposition of calcareous matter from the water, is so copious, 

 that an old water-course had actually ' crept upwards to a height of nearly 

 three freet ; and the rapidity of the deposition was such, that some spe- 

 cimens were collected on the grass, where the stony crust was already 

 formed, although the verdure of the leaf was as yet but imperfectly withered 

 (p. 1 1 4) : a fact, which renders less extraordinary M.Peron's statement, that 

 the excrements of kangaroos had been found concreted by calcareous mat- 

 ter.— ^Peron, vol. ii. p. 116. § Voyage, h. 1 16. 



|| Edin. Phil. Journ. 1825, pp. 116, 117, 1 18, and 254-5. 



Dirk 



