BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETmO. 



435 



The little village of Orestoii is situated on the left bank, and very near the 

 mouth of the tidal estuary of the Plyin, which, under the name of Catwater, is 

 one of the harboui's that nature has so liberally grouped together at Plymouth. 

 It is essentially a limestone village, being based on, built of, and surrounded 

 by lunestone ; its chief prospect consists of the limestone-hills and quarries of 

 Catdown, from which Catwater divides it ; behind it are the quarries whence 

 the stone for the celebrated Plymouth breakwater was hewn, and its only trade 

 is the exportation of limestone. 



It appears from a paper in the Philosophical Transactions for 1817 that 

 " when Mr. ^\liidbey engaged to superintend that most arduous undertaking 

 the Plymouth breakwater Sir Joseph Banks requested him to examine nar- 

 rowly any caverns he might meet with in the rock, and have the bones, or any 

 other fossil-remains that were met with carefully preserved."* This limestone 

 is regarded by geologists as the Devonshire equivalent of the Old Red sand- 

 stone. Like the lunestones of South Devon generally, it is much fissured and 

 broken ; hence the expectation that caverns would be found in it was most 

 reasonable. 



The result of the request made by Sir Joseph has been the discovery 

 that the volume of limestone at Oreston is a geological classic of great 

 interest. From time to time, portions of it have been translated by the great 

 palaiontological scholars, Sir Everard Home, Dr. Buckland, Mr. Clift, and 

 Professor Owen, and given to the world in various forms and publications. 

 Three papers on the subject will be found in the " Philosophical Transac- 

 tions." Oreston also figures largely in Dr. Buckland's "Reliquse Diluvianse," 

 and in Professor Owen's " British Possil Mammalia and Birds." 



The Oreston quarries were opened to furnish the materials for the Break- 

 water on the 7th August, 1812. In November, 1816, Mr. Wliidbey sent up 

 to Sir Joseph Banks his fii'st consignment of bones, with a statement that 

 " They had been found in a cavern in the solid limestone-rock, fifteen feet wide, 

 forty-five feet long, taking the direction into the cliff, and twelve feet deep. 



This cavern was filled with solid clay, in which the bones were hnbedded at 

 about three feet above its base. 



When Mr. Wliidbey began to work this quarry, the rock was seventy- 

 four feet perpendicular above high-water ; the bones were found seventy feet 

 below the surface of the rock, and about four feet above high-water 

 mark. He quarried sixty feet horizontally into the cliff before he came to the 

 cavern. 



Before Mr Whidbey began to quarry here one hundred feet had been 

 quarried into the cliff, so that one hundred and sixty feet was the distance 

 between the cavern and the original edge of the cliff ; in all other directions 

 the quarries consist of compact lunestone to a great extent. The workmen 

 came to this cavern by blasting through the solid rock, and at the depth in the 

 rock at which it was met with the surrounding limestone was everywhere 

 equally strong and requiring the same labour to quarry it. Mr. Whidbey saw 

 no possibility of the cavern having had any external communication through 

 the rock in which it was inclosed. 



" Many such caverns," Mr. Whidbey says, " have been met with in these 

 quarries, and, in some instances, the rock on the inside was crusted with 

 stalactite ; but nothing of that kmd was met with in the cavern in which the 

 bones were found, so that there is no proof that any opening in the rock from 

 above had been closed by infiltration."f 



The above-mentioned fossils were described by Sir Everard Home in a paper 



* Philosophical Transactions, 1817, p. 176. 

 t Ibid, 1821, pp. 133-4, 



