486 



THE GEOLOGIST. 



find the liard duna-looking defensive shields of some curious species. 

 Those who care to know what these are, and to search for them in 

 Old Red quarries at Chetton, Grlazely, and Overton, will find them 

 described in my ''Rocks of Worcestershire" (London: Masters; 1860). 

 Upon the Old Red Sandstone lie the Carboniferous beds — the next 

 accumulation of time. The line near Linley cuts through some 

 fresh-water (?) deposits of this age, in which are bands of hard 

 cream-coloured limestone, containing estuarine bivalve- shelled Crus- 

 tacea {Gypris or Gytlieridoe) , and very tiny teeth, hard, black, and 

 shining, of small predatory fishes. The outcrop of rock crossed here 

 by the line extends as a belt of surface varying in width from two 

 hundred yards to a mile, due south, but does not again approach the 

 river-channel until we reach Hampton's Load, where low hills, 

 shutting in the channel westward, introduce us again to the poor, 

 dirty clays that lie above the coal. 



From the ferry to the Victoria bridge the line has its course through 

 deposits of this age, though in some places — chiefly on the banks 

 opposite Upper Arley — a thickness of twenty to thirty feet of Severn 

 Strait gravel and sand obscures the Carboniferous measures. Here, 

 however, the line is carried by a cutting deep into the underlying 

 yellow sandstone rock, and a very instructive section of that important 

 member of the coal-rock group is obtained. Beyond the crossing of 

 the river there is an extension of these coal-beds into Eymoor Wood, 

 in fact the picturesque clifi" of Seckley Rock points clearly to related 

 measures in the hills eastward of the river, 



A mile south of the bridge we run into Old Red, aforesaid, at the 

 Hill Wood. Half a mile of cutting through this and then coal- 

 measm^e rock shuts in the hne, resting on natural position against the 

 dome. For two miles this, once again along the course of the Severn 

 Valley Railway, forms its surface, very greatly to the pleasure of the 

 geologist, for here is a notable exposure — thanks to the railway-work 

 — of its fossiliferous measures. Several layers of sandstone and shale 

 with plant-remains, may be noticed in the banks on each side ; but at 

 a point parallel with ISTorthwood Cottage, a pretty white house front- 

 ing the river, we run through a cutting of gTey shales, with brown- 

 black seams of fern-coal, every layer of which contains fossil plants, 

 in greater or less abundance. Indeed, if a braken bed had suddenly 

 been overwhelmed by a flood, and the ferns buried beneath the muddy 

 sediment just as they grew, no richer deposit of plants could have 

 been got together. Ferns chiefly, belonging to the genera Fecoi^teris, 

 Kcuroptcris, SpTienojjteris, and Dictijoj)fcris, of which latter genus, (a 

 noticeable one among the group for having reticulated venation), a 

 species recently discovered in a continuation of these measm'es a mile 

 north of this spot, is here very plentiful. This has been described 

 b}' Prof. Morris, under the provisional name of Woodwardites (?) 

 Eohr rf.^i* but it must be identical with a Dictyopteris of the Dresden 

 coal-field. 



* Geol. Soc. Jom'u., vol. xv,, p. 82. 



