1875.] 183 [Scudder. 



closely packed with masses of tough blue clay, much exceeding the 

 sand in bulk, and forming the floor of the fossiliferous beds. 



These consist first, at base, of twenty-two inches of coarse sand, in 

 which the oyster, quahog, and common clam are the prevailing 

 forms, the first predominating to such a degree as to make the name 

 of oyster-bed the most appropriate. This merges into a serpula-bed, 

 about twenty-eight inches in thickness, made up almost altogether of 

 large masses of Serpula, packed in sand and almost wholly devoid of 

 other fossils. The bed of worn shells superimposed on this is about 

 twenty-two inches in thickness and closely resembles coquina, except 

 in the entire want of adhesion between the fragments. 



This bed is followed by about ten feet of fine, white, thinly bedded 

 sand, and this by the stratified drift of the island, to a depth, as esti- 

 mated by Desor and Cabot, of forty-two feet; the foot of peat men- 

 tioned by them is wanting at this exact locality (though present a 

 few hundred feet farther south), leaving the drift covered by five or 

 six feet of dune-sand, more or less intermixed beneath with loam. 



On following the bed of broken shells along the face of the cliff, it 

 was found to thin out to about a foot in thickness twenty-five feet on 

 either side of the most prominent point, where the section was made, 

 and which has doubtless been longer protected than the other parts 

 of the bluff by the former presence of a great mass of clay next the 

 water's edge, called "Antony's Nose "; beyond these twenty-five feet, 

 the bed of broken shells becomes more or less obscured by an admix- 

 ture of sand, gravel and serpula, and is entirely lost at forty feet 

 distance on either side. 



The general dip of the strata, from the lowermost clay to the bed of 

 worn shells, is to the southwest. The uppermost beds incline along 

 the face of the cliff three degrees to the south, while the inclination 

 to the west (along the section dug out of the cliff) is eleven degrees, 

 making a dip of nine degrees to the southwest. All the beds below 

 this also incline eleven degrees to the west, but the inclination of 

 their face toward the south increases gradually in passing downward, 

 that of the upper edge of the lower clay reaching eleven degrees, 

 and making the southwesterly dip of this bed seventeen degrees. 

 There is no evidence of any thinning out of the gravel-bed, as stated 

 by Desor and Cabot, nor of any unconformability between this bed 

 and the underlying clays ; but, on the contrary, every appearance 

 that the latter belong to the same continuous series as the former. 



