GYMNOSPERM^. 



81 



adheres to the tongue when dry, and never becomes plastic when wet. It is quarried 

 near Glenarm, and certain beds a Kttle in rear of that town, formerly cut through to reach 

 it, abounded in handsomely preserved plant remains, whose dark colour rendered them 

 conspicuous against their white matrix. It is unfortunate that during the whole progress 

 of the quarrying operations no one, not even the officers of the Geological Survey, who 

 were then on the spot, thought it worth while to collect, so that only a few stray 

 specimens were preserved. I am able, however, through the courtesy of their proprietor 

 and the energy and interest taken in the subject by Mr. Walter Jamieson, to have the 

 mine drained and again rendered accessible, so that I have great hopes that this, by far 

 the most beautiful and best preserved of any Plora included in the Basalts, either of 

 Greenland or elsewhere, may be properly investigated. It seems to be similar to the 

 Ballypalady Flora except that it is far richer in leafy trees. A detailed description will 

 not be possible until the drainage of the mine shall have been accomplished. 



The principal deposits of lignite are above the bauxites and sometimes rest upon them. 

 The thickest beds vary from two to five feet in depth and occur at Ballintoy on the coast, 

 about thirty miles distant from Glenarm. They are full of compressed wood, with well- 

 defined structure and belonging to trunks of trees which must in some cases have been of 

 considerable girth. The leaf-bearing portions are very compact, but split readily into laminae, 

 on the surfaces of which the leaves, fragmentary and much macerated before being imbedded, 

 are faintly defined by their more glistening surfaces. The majority of the leaves contained 

 in them belong to a pecuhar triple-nerved form, whose affinities are not yet understood, 

 named MacClintocMa by Heer, and which is abundant in some of the Greenland shales.^ 



The Iron-ores are widely spread, and occasional minor beds of bole are distributed 

 throughout the formation without any apparent order ; but these are merely the result of the 

 surface decomposition of the lava between successive flows. The principal beds are on 

 one horizon, and extend from the coast near the Giant's Causeway to Ballypalady, a spot 

 a few miles south of Ballymena. Opinions differ as to whether the pisolitic ores were 

 formed by confervoid Algse in shallow lakes, or are the more direct products of the decom- 

 position of Basalt. All the boles that were formerly sub-aerial soils are unfossihferous 

 unless roots or stems happen to be preserved, which is often the case, while the pisolitic 

 ores and conglomerates, if really lake-deposits, have probably from their nature 

 permitted the plants they may once have contained to go on decaying away after they 

 were embedded. The only fossiliferous iron-ores occur at Ballypalady, about a mile from 

 Templepatrick, and were formerly quarried on each side of the railway. Detailed sections 

 have been published by Portlock, Tate and Holden, Baily, and Kinahan, but the changing 

 operations of the quarryman have made it difficult to exactly reconcile them with the faces 

 now exposed. The beds are laminated clay-iron-ore, fine breccias or conglomerates, and thin 

 seams of lignite irregularly deposited and somewhat twisted, and some twenty-five feet 



1 The best account of the Irish Lignites is that by Mr. William Gray, ' Tenth Annual Report of the 

 Belfast Field Club,' 1872-73, p. 28. 



