494 LICKEY QUARTZ ROCK PROVED TO BE ALTERED CARADOC SANDSTONE. 



and the beds beneath it 3 that the fucoid-like ramifying bodies were formerly obtained by the 

 Rev. J. Yates, which are figured, (Geol. Trans., Vol. II. PI. 27.), and I found similar specimens 

 during my visit. After penetrating this limestone, the coal speculators sunk till they were stopped 

 by a hard quartzose sandstone and reddish slaty clay, similar to that which rises on the eastern 

 flanks of the quartz hills. 



From these facts I quite convinced myself that the quartz rock of this ridge occupied 

 the place of the Caradoc Sandstone. The completion of a new road from Bromsgrove 

 to Birmingham, however, completely established the correctness of this view, by laying 

 open the northern extremity of Snead's Heath, one of the hills composing the ridge. 

 Here a reddish, siliceous sandstone, from thirty to forty feet thick, regularly bedded, is 

 inclined about 15° to the east, which carries it directly beneath the impure limestone 

 of the Colmers above-mentioned. The upper beds contain many casts of fossils which, 

 owing to the pulverulent nature of the sandstone (made up of rounded grains of quartz 

 with scarcely any cementing matrix except a little iron), can seldom be well preserved, 

 though they are very clearly displayed when fresh quarried. Among them I recognised 

 several well-known fossils of the Caradoc Sandstone, particularly the Pentamerus ob- 

 longus ; and Heliopora pyriformis, a coral very abundant in May Hill and other places. 

 These fossiliferous sandstones having in themselves a half fused appearance, form the 

 upper portion of the true quartz rock of these hills, into which they graduate insensibly 

 at Snead's Heath, so that it is impracticable to draw any defined line between the red- 

 dish fossiliferous sandstone and the quartz rock. The quartz rock itself is stratified 

 with equal regularity throughout the whole of this little range : in some places plunging 

 to the W.N.W., as in the great masses laid open near the Rose and Crown, in others 

 to the E.S.E., which is the prevalent dip ; in a third case it is found thrown over as a 

 saddle, dipping in the same small hill to both sides of the axis ; in a fourth it is arranged 

 en dome. A transverse section from the west of Snead's Heath by Colmer's to Holly- 

 moor farm, has the appearance represented in PL 37. f. 7., whilst a section across the 

 ridge of the old Birmingham road is shown in PL 37. f. 8. 



The beds of the quartz rock vary from a few inches in thickness to four feet ; and they present 

 all the gradations from the fossiliferous siliceous sandstone above described, to a hard granular 

 quartz grit, and from that into a pure quartz rock 1 . In general, the colour is greyish- white or yel- 



1 Casts of fossils in these beds Were noticed by Mr. Yates, Geol. Trans., vol. ii. The same author, in mi- 

 nutely describing the composition of this rock, notices the occasional presence of scattered grains of malachite 

 and of brown hematite. Also, that the common ore of manganese had been collected on the eastern slopes of 

 the hill. I have myself observed grains of black oxide of manganese diffused through the New Red Sandstone 

 in contact with the quartz rock. 



It is further well worthy of remark, that the sloping surfaces of this little quartz ridge are in parts covered 

 with a breccia of angular fragments of the rock itself, which seems to have fractured and recemented in place. 

 It is, therefore, strictly a local phenomenon, though it is to be observed that a " breche en place," has been 

 observed on the sides of a similar ridge of quartz rock, the Stiper Stones, which breccia I believe to be of higher 

 antiquity than the adjacent coal measures, of which it seems to form the lower edge or base, p. 285. 



