56 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY O**" MANCHESTER. 



Thursday^ December \6th 1841. — James Heywood^ Esq. 

 President, in the chair. The President opened the proceed- 

 ings by noticing the great loss which this Society had sus- 

 tained in the lamented death of its Vice President, the late 

 John Eddowes Bowman, Esq. (vide p. 35), and communi- 

 cated, that a letter of condolence had been forwarded to Mrs. 

 Bowman from the council. 



Mr. Binney read a letter from Sir P. de Grey. M. Eger- 

 ton, Bart, M.P. offering to present a suite of European rocks 

 (510 in number) to the Society. Various donations were 

 also announced from Messrs. Heywood, Westhead, and 

 Black, to whom a vote of thanks was duly passed. 



A paper was read, entitled " Observations on the fossil 

 fishes found in the Manchester coal field,'' by Mr, E. W. 

 Binney. The Bradford and Clayton coal field, generally 

 known as the " Manchester coal field," is a wedge-shaped 

 area, commencing at a point in Kirkmanshulme, and gra- 

 dually extending in width till it reaches St. George's Church, 

 and the works of Mr. John Andrew, below Harpurhey, in a 

 line between which two places it appears to have been thrown 

 down by a fault, and covered with the new red sandstone 

 formation. The total thickness of the strata is about 700 

 yards. Beginning with the upper strata and proceeding in 

 the descending order, in the red marls in the bed of the 

 Medlock, specimens of the bivalve shell [Unio ?) so common 

 in those deposits occurred; no traces of Cypris ov Micro con- 

 chus were observed associated with them, whilst the contrary 

 takes place in the limestone beds and black bass on the small 

 coal. The bass lying above the three quarters coal, is very 

 rich in the remains of fishes mingled with the above named 

 fossils ; a few detached*scales were found in the basses above 

 the new and two feet coals, as well as in those above the two 



