SUBMERGED PEAT AND FOREST BEDS. 



27 



In the excavation for the New Market in Beresford 

 Street, I took sketches and notes of the following layers from 

 above downwards : — 



1. — Rubble from old buildings aud fine blown sand, 3 to 



4 feet. 



2. — Peat, mixed with sand, 1 foot. 



3. — Stiff greyish clay, and fragments of stone, 3 feet. 



4. — Firm black peat, hazel nuts, fragments of trees, and 



Juncits conglomeratus, abundant, 4 to 5 feet. 



5. — Clay and stone. 



In the lower peat Mr. Dancaster found a perfectly round 

 stone about the size of a tennis ball ; it was blackened by the 

 peat, and bore no marks of usage as an implement. This 

 may have been a missile used by a Neolithic hunter. 



In the excavation for the foundations of the Victoria 

 Club, within fifty or sixty yards of the last, the strata were 

 the same, except that the lower peat was absent. 



Mr. Gilpin, a well-sinker of St. Helier's, has kindly given 

 me the following description of the strata passed through in 

 boring a well in Peter Street, about 200 yards eastward of the 

 Victoria Club excavation : — 



1. — Clay, 4 feet. 



2. — Brown peat, 2 feet. 



3. — Clay, gravel, and fragmeuts of stone, 4 feet. 



4. — Black peat, with wood and hazel nuts, 14 feet. 



5. — Blue clay, gravel and stone fragments, 5 or 6 feet. 



6. — Bock (Granite). 



Dr. Dunlop, in the article to which I have referred above, 

 gives details of four excavations and borings in the neigh- 

 bourhood of the old North Pier, all at the margin of loAv-tide 

 level. In these the order of the beds is the same ; the thick- 

 nesses of each varying in the same proportion as in the inland 

 sections. The absence of the lower peat bed in the Victoria 

 Club excavation, in close proximity to two sites where it 

 is abundantly in evidence, is a point of importance to which I 

 shall again have occasion to refer. 



Of exposures that occur from time to time upon the coast 

 by the removal of the overlying sand and shingle by the sea, 

 the principal ones are as follows : — 



At Greve d'Azette, about 200 yards due south of Grande 

 Charriere. Here the exposure is frequent, and an oak tree, 

 20 feet in length by about 4 feet in diameter, which lies 

 prostrate, but is still firmly rooted at one side, has been in that 

 position to my personal knowledge for quite fifty years, and 



