FOREST OF WYRB AND TITTEESTONE CLEE HILL COAL FIELDS. 1001 



The overlying Keele Group, as already mentioned, I refer to the true Upper Coal 

 Measures ( = Radstockian Series), of which it is the basal part. 



At a later date, the name Staffordian Series was substituted for the earlier term 

 "Transition Series" which had been applied to these rocks.* This alteration in 

 nomenclature was suggested chiefly from two considerations : firstly, that the term 

 "Transition Formation" had been used for rocks of Lower Carboniferous or Culm 

 age, and, though in that sense the term seems to be now out of use, its employment 

 might lead to confusion ; f and secondly, as the series is so well represented in 

 Staffordshire, and has been so fully described in the northern portion of that county 

 by Dr Gibson, it was more appropriate to name it after the area where it had been 

 most fully worked out and could be best studied. 



It was with these rocks, then, which we now call Staffordian Series, that Cantrill 

 correlated the rocks he described in the Forest of Wyre under the name of " Upper 

 Coal Measures." This correlation holds good to-day, if we remember that the Keele 

 Group, also present in the Wyre Forest, is retained in the Upper Coal Measures. 



It will also be seen that Cantrill was right in referring the Lower Coal Group 

 to the Middle Coal Measures ( = Westphalian Series). 



The present investigations were instituted with the object of determining which 

 groups of the Staffordian Series are present in the Wyre Forest Coal Field, and to 

 ascertain if the Keele Group could be shown by fossil evidence to be present in the 

 area. Though the latter of these questions we have not been able to solve on 

 palseontological grounds, some advance has been made in the elucidation of the other 

 points, as well as in adding to our knowledge of the fossil flora of British Carbon- 

 iferous rocks. 



PART I. 

 THE GEOLOGY OF THE FOREST OF WYRE COAL FIELD. 



In ordinary circumstances it would not be necessary, in what is mainly a palseo- 

 botanical paper, to enter into a detailed geological description of the district. But 

 as the Wyre Forest Coal Field, though mapped on the one-inch scale by the Geological 

 Survey over fifty years ago, has not been described in any official memoir, it has 

 been thought advisable to lay before the student a brief account of the strati- 

 graphical sequence and geographical distribution of its various Carboniferous 

 divisions. The reader will thus more readily appreciate the problems that still 

 await solution. 



The Forest of Wyre Coal Field \ commences at Bridgnorth, on the Severn, in 



* Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc, vol. lxi, p. 320, 1905. 



t See Goppert, Floram fossilem Formationis Transitionis = Die fossile Flora ales bbergangsgebirges, Breslau, 1852. 

 + The coal field is included in the Old Series One-Inch Geological Maps, Sheets 61 S.E. (1852-55, revised 1868) 

 and 55 N.E. (1853-55), and in the New Series One-Inch Ordnance Maps, Sheets 167 and 182. It covers parts of 



Shropshire, Worcestershire, and Staffordshire. 



